In a first attempt at bringing social media to the Sherardian Libary of Plant Taxonomy (part of my numerous graduate trainee projects), I created a set of bookmarked websites through the site, Delicious.com that I thought might be useful for research in plant taxonomy, floristics, plant systematics, genomics and evo-devo (evolutionary-developmental) studies.
These Delicious bookmarks can be found here (plant scientists please take note!):
http://www.delicious.com/sherardianlib
Apparently, Delicious, which is now owned by Yahoo! might be shut down, however, these rumours have been denied.
Should Delicious be shut down, what would happen to the vast amount of data found and saved on the site?
The closure of such a web-based "libraries" brings up issues as to the transitory nature of information on the WWW. Of course, it is to be hoped that there will somehow be an archive to preserve such information.
Hope to get into this a bit more through studying digital archives, but for now, it's time for a the morning cuppa...
Hey Sarah, I was pretty disappointed to hear about the (potential) demise of delicious. It's a really handy service, and our library uses it quite heavily. As you said, it's a reminder of the transitory nature of online information, and also the vicissitudes of using third-party resources to provide library services.
ReplyDeleteI found this post by Brian Herzog really helpful. It has some information about alternatives to delicious and how to shift your delicious account to different services: http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2010/12/21/the-dilemma-with-delicious
Also, it's awesome that you're in the library blog world, and I look forward to reading more from you (... including a possible bodacious bodcast collaboration, ahem)
Kirsty