Lunch meeting with Danish Development Research Network about social bookmarking

Next week I will introduce social bookmarking to the staff members of the Danish Development Research Network (DDRN) in Denmark. DDRN is a network linking research-based knowledge and development within the sectors of agriculture, environment, and governance. The overall goal of DDRN is to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance and in partner countries' development activities.  As a result, the website contains a great collection of valuable e-resources that is being maintained by the staff members.

The presentation, which I will soon upload to this weblog, will kick-off with what social bookmarking is. This will be done in just a couple of minutes, because social bookmarking is not different from what we always did when reading documents/books/papers (highlighting important text and adding bookmarks on the pages which were interesting to you). This activity of bookmarking crucial elements in a book, journal or document can also be done on the Internet.

Within the first Internet browsers, the option to save bookmarks from the Internet was better known as 'bookmark this page' or 'add to favourites'. You could have found a really interesting page on the Internet after complex searches with Google, Bing or other search engines. But what would happen when you log off your computer, could you still find the same e-resource back? In order to make sure that you could retrieve it again, people were bookmarking the pages via the browser. As a result, favourite websites were saved locally on your computer. One of the disadvantages was that the more favourite websites were being saved locally, the more complex the structure of folders became within your Internet browser. Another disadvantage was that when you were not behind the computer where the favourite websites were stored, you could not access the collection of favourite websites. As a result, bookmarking services were being launched on the Internet. Delicious.com is one of the platforms where people save their favourite websites on the Internet. Thus, via Delicious.com you can access your favourite websites wherever you are. The only requirement is that there is an Internet connection.

But what makes bookmarking platform on the Internet, such as Delicious.com, social? The social aspect is that it lets you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. In order to make sense of this, I will browse through a test account for DDRN on delicious (http://delicious.com/ddrntest).

First of all, the presentation about social bookmarking in general and Delicious.com specifically will result in showing the staff members of DDRN that by doing an individual and administrative activity - saving a favourite website for the DDRN resource collection - it is automatically being shared with other people than only the users of the DDRN website.  This improves the visibility of the DDRN.

Secondly, the DDRN can also follow other users on a social bookmark platform who have the same interests and perhaps can lead to a better overview of valuable e-resources within DDRN's themes.

Thirdly, the data in DDRN social bookmark account (the favourite websites) can easily be merged/integrated in other social media tools or the own website of DDRN. For example, Focuss.Info is embedding an open-source search engine from Google. This search engine is indexing the accounts of peers from all over the world who are only bookmarking in the field of global development studies and research. As a result, Focuss.Info generates specific search results and results in less noise for peers than generic search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.  Furthermore, the e-resources indexed by Focuss.Info are not only selected by librarians, but also students, researchers and individual practitioners.

So, if DDRN is dedicated to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance, they would be better off to continuing to save favourite e-resources on (open) social bookmarking platforms, rather than to maintain this in their closed content management system.  It is the task of DDRN to facilitate ways that push information to as many people as possible in a low-cost and efficient-friendly ways, and pull valuable information which could be mentioned on the DDRN website.