Thing 11. Tagging and Del.icio.us

I'm a relatively recent convert to del.icio.us. I didn't see the point because I had Google's bookmark sync setup, so I had my bookmarks on all my workstations already. I'm also a bookmark pack rat, and one day I decided I was going to give del.icio.us a try in an attempt to get them better organized and available from any PC without needing to install any software. It's been great. I no longer scroll through pages of bookmarks to find the one I want. It has also saved me from keeping 30 tabs open to websites I thought looked interesting, but I hadn't had the time to give more than a cursory glance. Now, with the del.icio.us toolbar, I just tag them and know that they'll be there when I'm looking for something on that topic.

I can see this being a very good tool at libraries to share commonly used bookmarks, they can be available to any computer in the library. I can also see pulling an RSS feed for a certain tag and putting that as part of the content on the library's website. It's a great way to share interesting items with coworkers and/or patrons.

Thing 10. Wikis

I am a big fan of wiki software. When I started at Fastenal almost 2 years ago, there was very little documentation for my group. One of the first things I did was install MediaWiki(Wikipedia's software) on my workstation and started documenting things about servers, services, and policies as I learned them. After just a few months of doing that, everybody saw how easy and valuable that was, so we decided to purchase commercial wiki software. We chose Confluence which I had used in at my previous workplace. They were already using Jira from the same company for bug tracking, issue tracking, & project management, so it just made sense. I'm a big fan of Confluence, if you are looking for an enterprise class wiki with paid support. Its very easy to use and the permissions can be very granular.

I think all of the examples of libraries using wiki software in this "Thing" are great. There are lots of open source and hosted versions of wiki software out there, so the cost of entry can be very low. It's a great way to get some quick and dirty documentation started, and everybody can refine it.