Back in the early days of the internet, when those of us working occasionally from home, or different locations, and/or on different browsers, needed some way of storing bookmarks in a shared space (well before the cloud existed), Delicious came along,(see Wikipedia entry for history) allowing anyone to set up a free account, put their bookmarks onto a third party website, organise them into folders, add metadata, and share them across locations, with friends, work networks, or the whole world. Many organisations enthusiastically took it up as a way of combining, organising, and sharing workplace links, avoiding duplication and promoting sites for all their users, colleagues and customers.
Unfortunately, though it was one of the first in the game, Delicious struggled to keep up with the times, technology changes, and the advanced features provided by competitors such as Diigo and Pinboard. It has been sold and re-structured several times in the last 15years, each time changing formats and processes slightly – just enough to make it an irritating exercise in re-formatting, re-linking, and (re-)promoting for an information service provider.
The Bodleian Law Library set up its own Delicious account in its early days, and encouraged staff to add usefully tagged links to resources of likely value to anyone in our fields of interest. In the mid noughties, Delicious briefly went out of operation and so the library moved its bookmarks to Diigo, another free service, which brought with it some additional functionality and appeared to be more stable.
When Delicious was bought by Yahoo, and became active once more, we decided to run it alongside Diigo, as several people were ‘following’ us, and we had even had positive comments on its usefulness as a library service from members of the law faculty. And besides, there was a facility within Diigo to copy any bookmarks we added there straight into Delicious too, so we weren’t having to duplicate the work.
But finally, in July this year, Delicious was bought by Pinboard and has been scrapped, as they encourage existing Delicious users to set up an £11 a year Pinboard account instead. Any of you still using Delicious and keen to continue ‘shared’ access to bookmarks, will need to export your links to a new service, or do more sharing in the cloud.
The Bodleian Law Library will continue to use Diigo, (https://www.diigo.com/profile/lawbod), with plans to add links and tag clouds to various places on our website, to help get you to useful topical bookmarks.
Clicking the tag for, say, “Copyright free” will bring you to a list of bookmarks with that tag.
Note, these are listed in chronological order, with the most recently added item at the top. If there is a specific page you are trying to find, and you are not sure which tags have been assigned, there is also a search facility at the top of the Diigo screen to let you find it. And if you have your own library and find one of our bookmarks that you’d like to keep, simply click on the floppy disk icon on the right to Save to Mylibrary
If you use Diigo, individually or in a shared work group, it also offers additional features, such as adding notes, highlights or annotation to bookmarked pages, which can be very useful when collaborating with colleagues, or for pointing out key issues to service users.
You can see the annotations in your bookmarks list, and when you follow the link you will see the notes or highlights on the page:
There is also a useful function called Outliners which can be used to sort your bookmarks into formatted lists with notes and descriptions – and then share as a link or add to a web page as a jumping off point for yourself, your group, or anyone who would find it useful.
https://www.diigo.com/outliner/dxs7db/Online-tools-and-resources?key=8ptg5s55yj
Many more features and functions are included in the free version, as well as tools you can make use of for importing or exporting references, adding Kindle hightlights, etc. And you can of course upgrade to a paid version for even more. Please have a look, and let us know if you have suggestions for links to add, uses for tagrolls, outliners etc – and help yourself to some useful bookmarks to assist your study, research or reference work
