Local and social bookmarking

Local bookmarking

Local bookmarks are those that are stored on a local pc, under a login id recognised by the network. Commonly, these are organised in the 'favourites' menu and can be divided into folders.
It's an advantage to bookmark this way because of the ease in accessing it. It doesn't matter which page you are currently on, you just open the 'favourites' tab in your browser and follow the folder path. If you are the only user of that browser, or are extremely familiar with it, this works ok.

If many people use the browser, confusion can arise. You might know a site is bookmarked in favourites, but not exactly where - a mad folder hunt can ensue. If many people need to bookmark many things, the favourites and its folders can get quite messy. Another disadvantage of local bookmarking is that you can only access the bookmarks using the local id; from an external network you cannot access your bookmarks through favourites.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarks are those that are stored in the cloud, using a tool such as Delicious. With a Delicious login, you can access all your bookmarks from anywhere that is connected to the internet. Instead of using folders, delicious organises the bookmarks with 'tags' - words used to describe the bookmark. A single bookmark can have many tags. By dispensing with folders, Delicious makes the task of organising many bookmarks easier. Instead of trawling through folders, users can search using the tags they think would have been used with the bookmark.

In a library environment, Delicious can be useful as often many different staff serve customers using the same workstation at different times. Use of a favourites menu could be an efficient task for a few, and a laborious trial-and-error process for everyone else. With a Delicous account, users need only search using tags and hopefully reach what they are looking for. For example, access to the official site of the NZ Government may be required, but the user can't find it in favourites...is it in the 'Government' folder? Or the 'Law and Legislation' folder?
With Delicious, one could search for tags such as 'government' and 'parliament' and bring up a list of bookmarks, one of which is the desired one http://www.beehive.govt.nz/
Also specific to libraries could be the efficient tagging of the many, many reader's advisory sites.
The Delicious account makes it easy for all staff to access and add to bookmarks from any pc that is connected to the internet.

A disadvantage for me personally is that Delicious is yet another program to have open and running all the time, whereas the fovourites are just there in the menu bar of whatever window you are viewing.