Social bookmarking

The Early Printed Books Project employs cataloguers in a number of Oxford college libraries. There are several websites useful for reference but these were listed as bookmarks on individual machines or as a printed appendix to the cataloguing manual. This made it impractical to keep track of sites which moved or to add new sites for the benefit of team members working on a different site. Unfortunately the project website (http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/icc/) was not being updated.

From June 2008 I experimented with putting the bookmarks on del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/earlybooks

I shared the username and password with my colleagues on the project but I'm not aware that anyone else contributed. Nonetheless, tagging the bookmarks made it simpler for me to find what I wanted, and having a list publicly available instead of stored in a browser meant I could still access it after leaving the project.

A minor disadvantage of del.icio.us is that its spare design meant there was no space to explain the source of these bookmarks: I could only include a link to the project website.

Owen Massey
(now at Worcester College)