Translation: Why del.icio.us is ineffectual for library catalogs

Lambert Heller told me that the FRBR Blog discussed my older post „Warum del.icio.us für Bibliothekskataloge untauglich ist„. Because the google translation is bad, i translate it in English, i hope i did it better than google 😉 I did only a few changes :

How i have write on the Mailinglist INETBIB, i think that the project to which Wilfred Drew of the Morrisville State College Library of the point at the mailinglist web4lib is not a good idea. He wrote that in his catalog it is possible to publish the findings with “post to del.icio.us” and addtoany could indexed at del.icio (Jakob Voss reports on it).

In my opinion this no equitable way to tag library collections, but a meander. Why that?

Objects that are indexed by del.icio.us are websites. This means if 1000 libraries index their holding by del.icio.us, there would be for every identical book up to 1000 entries, because the websites are always different. Users that search now at del.icio.us will find up to 1000 entries to the same resource that will not contain much more information. Additional it is not possible for libraries to get a benefit from the work in other library catalogs.

So what should be a alternative? The right way would be using a system that does not index websites but media. Examples for that are CiteUlike, Bibsonomy (the literature part) and LibraryThing [and very new the open library project]. Libraries should think about methods, how additional information about the media can added i this systems. It is certainly illusionary to expect, that there will be only one entry per media, but it would be more easy through editing of the entires to get further to this goal.

Del.icio.us is excellently suited to replace present link lists and index internet sources. Libraries who are doing this you will find at the mélange blog.

[Some improvements by Frank Wiederhold. Thanks for that]