Online Research Toolkit

del.icio.us is both a clever use of URL naming conventions (.us is for United States registered sites and has mostly been used for local government so far), and a really useful tool. del.icio.us is what is called a “social bookmarking” service. Bookmarking refers to saving links for websites that you want to go back to, like saving into your Favorites or Bookmarks in your web browser. del.icio.us has an advantage over a Favorites list because it’s online, so you can find that site you saved last week from any computer. The “social” part is from that fact that, being online, other people can see what you’ve saved and you can see what they’ve saved.

There are many social bookmarking services, and I’m using del.icio.us as a popular example of this type of service. The characteristics of del.icio.us and similar systems are: easy bookmarking of links, space for short notes (256 characters in del.icio.us), keyword tagging (more on that below), and full public access.

Keyword tagging is probably the biggest benefit of these systems. In your browser’s Favorites/Bookmarks list, you can organize your links into folders, but each link can only go into one folder (you could save a link more than once.) With a tagging system, you assign however many words you want to each link. This means you can personalize your “retrieval system”. For instance, if you find a site on mercury in fish, and you have an interest in environmental issues, you might tag the site “fish mercury pollution”. However, if you are interested in the medical risks of mercury to pregnant women, you might tag it “fish mercury toxicity pregnancy”. If you are have an interest in fish biology, you might add the fish species name as a tag. Etc., etc.

This provides an easy way of organizing notes for classes and projects. Figure out a unique tag for each course or project. The course number (ENG101, etc.) is a good place to start for course-related work. Sources for your final paper might be tagged “ENG101final”. Sources for a group project might be tagged “ENG101GroupB”. If your whole group uses the same tag, you can all find each other’s sources by searching for that tag. (It’s useful in this case to check to be sure you have a unique tag.)

While these services are designed for saving links to webpages, there are a few tricks for working with none online sources. You can link to the library catalog record of a book, for instance, or a webpage that cites the book or article you are interested in. Just make sure to note what it was you were actually saving in the note or description field. You can use a blog or other online publishing tool to save notes and save that link.

While all of the above will work for any social bookmarking service, there are a few reasons to use del.icio.us in particular. For one, del.icio.us is easy, quick, and quite stable. There are also dozens of addon tools for del.icio.us. The most useful for note-taking is Pasta. Pasta allows you to save a text note to del.icio.us and then access it just like you would any other link.

There are a few problems with del.icio.us and the similar services, as well. Your saved links are (almost) completely public. Also, since all you are saving are links, it doesn’t help if the page you had saved disappears. I’ll mention a few related services that help with these problems in separate entries.