april09b.indd


Ron Gilmour and Jennifer Stickland 

Social
bookmarking
for
library


services

Bibliographic access through Delicious 

Social bookmarking refers to Internet applica­tions that allow users to collect and label in­
formation resources both for their own use and 
for sharing with other users. Social bookmarking 
can be seen as the next step in the evolution of 
link management. Link management began with 
the “hot links” 
in the Mosaic 
browser. These 
evolved into the 
“bookmarks” of 
Netscape and 
the “favorites” 
of Microsoft 
Inter net Ex­
plorer.1 In all 
of these cases, 
lists of links 
were stored in 
a hierarchical 
folder struc­
ture within the 
browser. Such 
bookmarks were accessible only from one 
computer and were difficult to share with others. 
Social bookmarking allows users to save their 
bookmarks to the Internet, thereby making them 
available from any machine and, if desired, also 
making them visible to other users. 

A ubiquitous feature of social bookmarking 
systems is tagging. When a link is selected for 
bookmarking, the user can specify keywords, 
or “tags,” with which the link will be associ­
ated. The bookmarking application will make 
these tags available to other users as a list or as 
a “tag cloud.” This practice of informal tagging 
has earned the name “folksonomy,” refl ecting 

Figure 1. A catalog record with a “tag this item” link to Delicious. 

the fact that it is a vocabulary developed by 
end users as opposed to a top­down authorita­
tive taxonomy, such as the Library of Congress 
subject headings. 

Social bookmarking is often seen as a sort 
of anti­authoritarian technology that rejects the 

type of infor­
mation control 
t r a d i t i o n a l l y  
exercised by li­
brarians. Some 
librarians, in 
fact, seem to 
take offense 
at the idea of 
tagging. Critics 
complain that 
tagging lacks a 
controlled vo­
cabulary and 
that, at its worst, 
it amounts to an 
“idiosyncratic, 

indecipherable personal nomenclature.”2 

Social bookmarking is also characterized 
by the use of RSS. This allows easy linking to 
blogs, another major Web 2.0 application. Users 
can track certain tags. One could, for instance, 
be alerted whenever a new posting tagged 
“bioinformatics” is entered into the system, or 
one could see any new links that are added 
by a particular user. This functionality can be a 

Ron Gilmour is natural sciences librarian, e-mail: 
rgilmour@ithaca.edu, and Jennifer Strickland is fine 
arts librarian, e-mail: jstrickland@ithaca.edu, at Ithaca 
College in Ithaca, New York 
© 2009 Ron Gilmour and Jennifer Strickland 

234C&RL News April 2009

mailto:jstrickland@ithaca.edu
mailto:rgilmour@ithaca.edu


powerful tool for current awareness and offers 
a way to integrate tagged content into existing 
blogs and Web pages. 

Filmographies 
At Ithaca College, our work with Delicious be­
gan with a request from a faculty member for us 
to add Library of Congress (LC) subject headings 
to indicate the presence of Asian stereotypes in 
Hollywood feature films, such as Breakfast at 
Tiffany’s. This is not the type of information that 
LC subject headings were designed to describe, 
as it indicates a commentarial aspect of a fi lm, 
not what the film is about. Consequently, the 
cataloging department saw this as impractical 
and possibly contrary to good cataloging prac­
tice. However, 
adding such 
subject access 
would certainly 
increase the 
usefulness of 
this collection. 

The case of 
Asian stereo­
types is by no 
means unique. 
We are often 
confronted with 
faculty mem­
bers who make 
use of fi lms in 
their classes in 
ways that are not 
reflected by LC subject headings. A professor of 
television and radio requested such DVD sets as 
Seinfeld and Sex and the City for their frequent 
restaurant scenes, with the intention of showing 
examples of how to light indoor spaces. A pro­
fessor of religion assigned a list of feature fi lms 
so that his students may analyze the treatment 
of the afterlife in popular culture. A third profes­
sor wanted to assemble a list of fi lms depicting 
people with disabilities. All of these examples 
illustrate cases in which a library user requires 
access points not available through traditional 
subject headings, which are often too broad, 
too specific, puzzling, or apparently arbitrary. 
Take, for example, the recent fi lm Across the 

Figure 2. Screen capture of a Delicious page in its native 
form. Visit this article online for detailed images. 

Universe. It has been assigned the subject head­
ing “Stevedores England Liverpool Drama.” The 
term “stevedores” is antiquated, and it is unlikely 
that the average library user would ever think 
to use it. A patron may, however, want a fi lm 
about the 1960s or the Vietnam War. 

Social bookmarking offers a means of adding 
access points to materials in the library catalog 
without the more time­consuming alteration of 
the catalog record. This assumes, of course, that 
the library’s catalog offers stable URLs. Tagging 
materials is a very simple procedure and can 
be performed by library staff that may not be 
familiar with HTML.3 

At Ithaca College, we have even added 
“tag this item” links to our catalog records 

to facilitate the 
tagging process 
(see fig. 1). Edit­
ing the results 
is much easier 
than manipu­
lating a static 
Web page, and 
multiple authors 
sharing a com­
mon account 
can work on a 
tagging project 
simultaneously. 
A page based 
on Delicious 

data is a live 
feed, and users 

will see new bookmarks as they are added. In 
addition, short annotations may be added to 
the links (e.g., “note Andy Rooney’s portrayal 
of Mr. Yunioshi”). Lists can be combined with 
a Boolean “and” by using a plus sign in the 
URL (e.g., delicious.com/iclibref/environmen­
tal_studies+biology). Since the end product is a 
publicly accessible Web page, it is easy to share 
the results with others. 

Your Delicious 
Delicious makes its data available via JavaScript 
Object Notation (JSON). This allows Web de­
signers to easily incorporate Delicious content 
into Web pages using JavaScript (delicious. 

April 2009  235 C&RL News 



Figure 3. Screen capture of an Ithaca Library Web page 
that displays data from Delicious. 

com/help/json/). On the Delicious Web site, 
our environmental studies bookmarks appear 
as in fig. 2. We feel that linking directly to the 
Delicious site may be confusing to users and 
prefer to put our own brand on the content. 
Consequently, we use JSON objects to allow us 
to display Delicious content inside our normal 
Web template (see fi g. 3). 

The JSON interface to Delicious is easy to use 
for anyone with a little JavaScript experience. 
It simply requires an http request to Delicious: 

<script type=”text/javascript” 
src=”http://Delicious/feeds/json/myaccount/ 

sometag”></script> 
The results are made available as the JavaS­

cript array Delicious.posts. This array can then 
be iterated through and the results displayed as 
follows: <script type=”text/javascript”> 

for (var i=0, post; post = Delicious.posts[i]; 
i++) { 

document.writeln(“<div><a href=’” + post.u 
+ “’>” + post.d +”</a></div>”)} 

</script> 
In this code example, the variable post.u 

contains the URL for the bookmark and post.d 
contains its title. If desired, the annotation can 
be displayed using post.n. 

JSON also allows the links to be sorted 
alphabetically using JavaScript and for links 
from multiple tags to be collected on one page. 
The ability to mix links from different tag sets 

is especially important since it 
allows the display of more than 
100 items (the normal limit for 
how many links Delicious will 
display). In order to circumvent 
this limit, we created multiple 
tag sets for subjects with a large 
number of bookmarks. 

So, for instance, we split our 
large biology collection into 
“biology” and “biologyI.” We 
use JavaScript to pull the results 
from these multiple tags into an 
array, sort the array, and display 
the results. Alternately, one can 
make use of the Delicious ap­
plication programming interface 
(API) rather than JSON if the limit 

of 100 items becomes problematic. 
The Delicious API allows users with program­

ming experience to manipulate items in their col­
lection of bookmarks (delicious.com/help/api/). 

The API defines ways to pass queries to 
Delicious using http. Many scripting languages, 
including Perl 4 and PHP 5, offer packages that 
serve as wrappers for the API, making it possible 
to write scripts in those languages that make use 
of Delicious data. In addition to these tools, we 
have written a PHP class called DeliciousPosts 
6 that uses the “post/all” method to retrieve all 
of the bookmarks for a given tag, not just the 
most recent 100 that are allowed by the JSON 
interface. DeliciousPosts also caches the results 
of a query such that the Delicious API service 
is not unduly burdened. 

After downloading DeliciousPosts, it may be 
invoked from a PHP script as follows: 

<?php 
require “DeliciousPosts.php”; 
$username = “Delicious_username”; 
$password = “Delicious_password”; 
$tag = “some_tag”; 
$dp = new DeliciousPosts($username, 

$password); 
$dp­>showPosts($tag); 
?> 

Conclusion 
Social bookmarking has enabled us to solve a 

236C&RL News April 2009



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problem of bibliographic access without 
recourse to modification of cataloging 
practice. 

The process of tagging resources in Deli­
cious is very simple. A variety of tools are 
available to allow creative and flexible use 
of the data, including its incorporation into 
existing library pages or templates. 

We posted links to the filmographies to the 
appropriate library subject guides on the Web. 

Response from faculty members to these 
Delicious­based filmographies has been very 
positive. Professors find that it is now far 
easier to locate appropriate films for their 
classes. It also offers a way for the library 
to promote special collections of films, such 
as those purchased for portrayal of Asians. 

This success has encouraged us to explore 
other ways of using Delicious, including new 
book lists, resource lists for individual classes, 
and even lists designed to answer specific 
reference questions. 

Notes 
1. Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben 

Lund, and Joanna Scott, “Social Book­
marking Tools (I),” D-Lib Magazine, 
11 (2005), www.dlib.org/dlib/april05 
/hammond/04hammond.html. 

2. John Maxymuk, “Bits & Bytes: Whose 
Space?” Bottom Line: Managing Library Fi-
nances, 20 (2007):97–100. 

3. Meslissa L. Rethlefsen, “Tags Help Make 
Libraries Delicious,” Library Jour nal, 132 
(2007):26–28. 

4. Stephan Schmidt and Tatsuya Tsu­
ruoka, Package Information: Services 
_Delicious, see pear.php.net/package 
/Services_Delicious. 

5. Aaron Straup Cope, Net::Delicious, 
v i s i t  s e a r c h . c p a n . o r g / ~ a s c o p e / N e t  
­Delicious­1.13/lib/Net/Delicious.pm. 

6. Ron Gilmour, DeliciousPosts.php, see 
rongilmour.info/software/deliciousposts. 

April 2009  237 C&RL News 

http:Delicious-1.13/lib/Net/Delicious.pm
www.dlib.org/dlib/april05
http:www.nutrition.org