Current mood:

cheerful

Delicious Del.icio.us
I love it. I love it because of my problems with having bookmarks on different computers and different browsers and my problems with remembering what any given bookmark actually is, of course,

But *mostly* I love it because it brings back the days when the card in the back of books in the library showed a list of who had borrowed that book. I loved seeing the same names crop up as I worked my way through the shelves. This system disappeared from the NYPL library pretty early on, but was still in use at the college I went to--I would check out classes given by professors whose names I found on interesting books, and if I saw the name of someone I knew on something obscure, I knew I had a go-to on that subject. Most of the time I just enjoyed seeing names--even if I had no idea who the people were, they were real people, they were the people who had carried around and read these books before me.

I use the public library alot--I'm power user of LEO--the online system that lets you locate and reserve books online (it's wild--I find a book, hit reserve, and within a week or so it's delivered to the library a block from my office). But I miss being the sense that there were actual other people reading the books I was reading, being inspired, educated, bored and entertained by the same things. Or not.

With del.icio.us I have the same sense of anonymity and community--I like looking at who else has tagged the sites I've tagged, and what else they're looking at.

Sounds banal I know, but it makes me happy.