Delicious - a social bookmarking site

Several years ago, I discovered Delicious, a social bookmarking site. I found it to be very useful in managing all those web sites we want to revisit. It was purchased by Yahoo! and earlier this year the site received a major (and long overdue) overhaul.

For each site you want to remember, you add a link title and the URL. You then add tags to help you remember the things you find helpful on the site and can even add your own description.

Here's a sample of a few things I have tagged "genealogy":

A few of my Delicious bookmarks for genealogy.

I don't just use it for research sites. I also use it to help me remember things I want to see or places I might want to eat when I do research trips or conferences.

I haven't scoped out Fort Lauderdale restaurants (as of the time I'm writing this post) for NGS 2016, but here are a few of the ones I gathered for the 2014 conference in Richmond.

A few restaurants I gathered in preparation for NGS 2014 in Richmond.

While this isn't my complete list of tags, it will show my most common ones.

My most used Delicious tags.

You can also sort that list alphabetically to make it easier to locate a tag.

I did, however, mention that it is a "social bookmarking" site. Users may follow other persons. (For any of you wanting to follow me, I'm "tnlori.") I also "pin" things to Pinterest, but Delicious is great for sites that are not "pinnable." Also, I've been using Delicious much longer because it pre-dated Pinterest.

Another genealogist and I once collaborated on a project involving research in multiple states. We intended to produce an article, but we lost interest after research I did proved the "interesting item" from another state was not the same man as the person in the two main states. The two of us used delicious to handle various online content items the other researcher would want to see. We used a common tag for our project. We could see items in each other's feed.

Delicious also has the ability to make a link "private" where only the person bookmarking the link sees it.

Other social bookmarking sites, such as Diigo, exist. Pinboard, which used to be free, now charges an annual fee for their service. I have not updated my Diigo account for several years although I visit it from time to time. I'm sure that my Pinboard bookmarks disappeared when I failed to pay the annual fee. Delicious is my favorite, especially with its new look and feel.

Genealogy Saturday at Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana on 16 April 2016

I will be making 4 presentations at Evansville, Indiana's Willard Library on Saturday, 16 April 2016.

Schedule:

9:30-10:30 AM - Social Networking for Genealogists
10:45-11:45 AM - Genealogy in the Clouds
1:00-2:00 PM - Exploring Your Ancestor's World with Maps
2:15-3:15 PM - Check Up Time: Examining Your Old Research

To register for any or all of these, go to http://www.willard.lib.in.us/calendar_of_events/index.php?Type=Genealogy, select the presentation(s) in which you are interested, and sign up!

Hope to see you there.

Thoughts on Genealogy-Specific Social Networking

This week we heard about a new social network that is specifically designed for those researching family history. The network is called Genealogy Wise or GenealogyWise. (They originally did not have a space, and now they do.) It's really not officially debuting until July 17, but hundreds of folks researching their ancestry have already flocked there.

My initial reaction was, "Why would I want another social network that I would have to visit on a daily basis that limits itself to only one group of my friends?" After signing up for the site out of curiosity, my initial reaction remains unchanged.

I am unimpressed with the "groups" which seem to be nothing other than queries for the most part that are already handled well by genealogy message boards and mailing lists. I have to admit that I started one group just so I could see exactly what administrative options were present. I am absolutely unimpressed with many of the undocumented family group sheet style posts that are being posted to the groups.

I joined one group on the first day. About the second day, there were about 20 people who were members of the group. I decided to glance through the membership and see how many were members of the corresponding state society and of APG. I was the only person signed up for the group who was a member of either. That told me something about this new social networking site because I knew it had been advertised to professional genealogists.

This social network is sponsored by FamilyLink. I've seen it reported on other blogs that they are paying some people to generate content. Unfortunately it is being buried under the deluge of queries being posted.

I really prefer Facebook for social networking because most of my genealogy friends as well as friends from church, high school, college, and other parts of my life are members. If I want to post a query, I'll do it on a message board.

Am I leaving GenealogyWise? Not yet. I'm not saying that I won't in the future. I'm giving it a chance. At the moment, it is not useful for me.

ACL 2007 Workshops

LibraryThing was down when the workshops for it were scheduled. I felt sorry for the presenter who had to rely on PowerPoint backup, but at least he had that! They were having a bookcover pile contest while it was down. We considered having a pile of librarians who were trying to access librarians while it was down and submitting that, but we didn't!

One of my colleagues and myself have talked several times about the workshop that showed how one library is using Facebook to reach its students where they are. I believe that we'll all be talking about how we can utilize Web 2.0 technologies to reach students in the coming academic year.

Another very interesting workshop was the one on customized toolbars which allow one to search things such as the library's online catalog, databases, and citation style guides. I'm already trying to figure out what we would need to include on one for our students. The presenters did tell us that it took time to develop them because of the code involved, but it is so useful that it will be worth the time.

I went to two cataloging workshops--one on authority control and one on metadata. I was very pleased with the direction the authority control presenter took. She approached it from the how it is changing and is likely to change perspective rather than it being a "how to" workshop. I know there were some in attendance who were looking for something a bit more hands-on, but having experience in the area, I was grateful for a more futuristic approach. The metadata was a good review for me of some of the skills that I'd been taught at a workshop back in about 2000. I really had not utilized this except in one digitization project since that time, and it was helpful to see the core elements of metadata for libraries once again.

The picture book update was great! This is the workshop where we get to pass around a lot of picture books which came out in the previous year. It's always interesting.