ABOUT DEL.ICIO.US

I watched a couple of video tutorials on You-Tube, on how to use del.icio.us. One of them was from the Santa Cruz Public Libraries.
The main advantage for using del.icio.us instead of a different search engine, is that the topics have already been filtered by the public. When doing a search, which by the way is not limited to just del.icio.us (you may search the whole web as well), the tag that you may use, has a high probability to yield good results since it has pretty much been already used several times to "mark" a certain web page, or article. That is the advantage of being a social networking site.
You are offered a list of related items, as well; and other possible tags. When about to tag a web page, you do not need to come up with an original idea, the "mass" as already done the job for you. You can either search a tag from your own list, or look at the recommendations (i.e. the list of tags used by other users to bookmark that page).
Your bookmarks are going to be public as well, unless you specify otherwise.

The possible uses of this tool for the Library, are first and foremost as a search engine. It is a way of finding a topic utilising several tags already in use by thousands of people. Sometimes it is hard to find the right word..., not a problem if you use del.icio.us!
Besides that, it can also become like a file cabinet of all the websites that have information of your interest cataloged with your own tags. It should alleviate the need of browsing the web for commonly searched subjects.
And finally, it allows you to use several tags each time that you bookmark a web page.
As they say in Spain "all roads lead to Rome"; in this case, all tags lead to the information you are looking for!