I primarily use delicious a way to manage online resources and documents that I am personally interested in. I tag library related information that might help out in my job or might be a good topic to blog about. I general interest news stories that I sent to my mom or other family members. I also tag websites that I need but use infrequently and can't easily remember off of the top of my head. Some of these websites are work/library related like admin pages to various databases, while others are personal such as the secure website to my son's grade school. The nice thing is that delicious allows you to share bookmarks or keep the private.

While I personally use delicious, there are some librarians who use delicious to create subject guides for users. Edward Corrado recently published the article, "Delicious Subject Guides: Maintaining Subject Guides Using a Social Bookmarking Site" in Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Librarian and Information Practice and Research. (Thanks aldricham for the tweet.) His method uses a JavaScript code from delicious so that the tags and resource information display correctly in the library's subject guide on the library Web page. This is method of creating subject guides is especially handing for any library that can create their own web pages, edit HTML and add JavaScript. Unfortunately there are many hospital libraries that cannot do this. Often the librarian is forced to use the hospital's web development software which often uses templates and prohibits editing the HTML. If this situation sounds familiar, never fear, you can still create subject guides using delicious. Take a look at the Health Sciences Library, Stony Brook's delicious account. The Tag Bundles on the right hand side refer broad subjects and lead to narrow topics within. At the top of the page the URL goes back to the library's site. The library's site has a link to its delicious links. So that the majority of your users know that this is a subject guide, I wouldn't label delicious links. I would go with something like "resources by subject."

Whether you personally use delicious or you decide use it in your library, delicious can be a very helpful resource.