According to Educause, tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. This principle raises some philosophical questions for us librarians, which are exacerbated by Richardson’s comment, "back in the old days we used to rely on librarians ... to sort and categorize information” and this system worked well because the professionals used a standard taxonomy (2010, p.91). Teacher librarians are still important and relied on in many settings to categorize, and assist with retrieval of, an ocean of information. In today's social bookmarking realm, however, anybody can use any word to tag sites, but we’re all doing it together, creating what is called a folksonomy. I know from experience using online library catalogs and even product lists in the retail sales environment, that having different people assigning tags or descriptions can obfuscate the message. Additionally, if you're using social tags to collect information via the read-write-web, you need to be careful to quote sources in case someone with an agenda is overloading topics with oppositional or misleading tags. Social bookmarking can simplify the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources among peers or students. A teacher can tag students by name to make sure they students see the suggested information. Unfortunately, this requires that each student also has a Delicious or Diigo account, which is not likely in elementary schools. At the same time, I can understand how my teaching life would be so much easier if I could just tag students, instead of telling each one individually which URL to visit for research.
Diigo and Delicious are similar, with the biggest different being Diigo allows the user to add annotations to saved sites. Bookmarking with Diigo also saves a screenshot of the websites in a personal archive, which can be helpful when a resource disappears, as often happens on the Web. Delicious seems to be easier to use, easier for amateurs and new users like me. The important thing is the tag. Lee Lefever (2009) says of tagging in Delicious that it “takes a world of chaos and makes it orderly,” and I agree that both these organizational systems are easy to use. There are so many other similar sites that I feel I might need another site to keep track of all the social bookmarking sites.