In my Reference 2.0 presentation yesterday I was pushing del.icio.us as a great way for librarians to organize their reference resources (bookmarks) and twice the idea of using a wiki (in addition or instead came up). I said I’d think about it and I have a bit and here’s my follow-up.
For the time being I’m still going to stick with del.icio.us as a better way to organize reference resources over wikis. This is not to say that wikis might not have a place at the reference desk for internal communication among reference staff (as I believe Rapid City Public Library is doing) but del.icio.us offers a more structured tag-based approach, and allows users to participate (subscribe to feeds, send links to the library) without allowing them to directly manipulate the library’s resource list. (My fear would be of a member of the public adding resources to the library’s list that the library felt were inappropriate and/or not up to the library’s reliability standards. Submitting a link the the library via del.icio.us allows for an approval process which I think is needed.)
So, there’s my thoughts on that issue. Comments, as always, are welcome.
