How I used Del.icio.us to solve a problem

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I learned about del.icio.us last year when I completed a paper on the use of natural language tagging in academic libraries. I opened an account and explored the uses of social bookmarking but couldn't figure out a way to incorporate it into my work environment.

Until one day, we decided to work on decreasing the amount of paper used in the department. Part of my job in the Acquisitions Department is to sort through and file publisher catalogs. The catalogs are available for librarians and faculty to examine and request items for the library to purchase. It's an overwhelming job because there are so many catalogs and they need to constantly be sorted and weeded. To make life easier, we bookmarked all the publisher sites as favorites on one of the computers in the department. That way when a faculty member or librarian wanted to look at catalogs all they had to do was sit at the computer and peruse the publisher websites.

This worked great until the computer crashed and we couldn't recover the 250 publisher websites that we had saved as favorites. Instead of looking them up and saving them to one computer again, I opened a del.icio.us account for the department and bookmarked all the publisher websites within our account. I also added tags to denote what disciplines the publisher covered to help for easy searching. Faculty can also use the del.icio.us account in the comfort of their own office or home. They just need to call the department and get the log in information. Then they are free to look at the websites and email the department with recommendations.

So that's my story on del.icio.us. How about you? How do you use del.icio.us??