Earlier this week there was a rumor that Yahoo! was going to kill off Delicious, a social bookmarking site used by many libraries (and many more people) as subject guides or as another service for patrons (here’s one such service from Cumberland County, PA). It’s now clear that Delicious will live on, but the widely reported imminent death of the service should serve as a warning to librarians. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket; have a back-up plan.
Platforms migrate, content on the web changes within static URLs, and URLs themselves can change. Will we be using mp3s to store audio in five years? I understand that funds are tight, and that staffing is sub-optimal, but use these moments to become stronger. Plan ahead.
In the meantime, if your library used or uses Delicious you may have a ton of information to move to another service or platform. Not just the links on Delicious, but the tags for those links as well. I’ve heard that Diigo will allow you to import Delicious links and tags, but they’re understandably swamped at the moment. Evernote is another option, although you’ll have to retag. I know someone with 15,000 bookmarks who’s not going to like that. Here are some alternative services.
Image from http://www.umbusiness.co.uk/?p=454.
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