Blogging assignment 3

Like others I've had a week off at half term and have found it really hard to get back into the course. I feel like I'm just skating over the surface of things rather than absorbing the content and incorporating it into my personal knowledge bank! At least I am remembering to check Bloglines for any new RSS feeds on a daily basis, having abandoned the idea of finding a service that would send me email alerts. I'm glad that some of you had already done this assignment as it's helped me get a feel for what is needed.

Blogging assignment 3 - part 1
I had to look at the sites Bertha listed several times before I got a feel for them. I tried searching on a couple of topics, one which I thought would be more patient related; PCOS, and another which I though specific health professionals would choose; Paediatric diabetes, using Del.icio.us and Digg. Searching for PCOS on Del.icio.us brought up thousands of sites mostly patient-related but the listing did not seem to prioritise the list by most tagged sites, and the more reputable government or NGO sites [ suchas Verity or Netdoctor] were well down the list. I'm used to seeing the search term highlighted rather than the number of people who tagged the sites, so found that a bit disconcerting. Digg by contrast did highlight the search terms for me, which I found more useful.
I can see that from a patient perspective there seems to be [on the surface] many useful sites for people with PCOS, but I would be concerned about the value/validity of many of them.

Having firstly tried a straightforward term to search, I then tried to search for Paediatric diabetes, which was more problematic. I had to try Paediatric & Pediatric diabetes, also Diabetic children and other variations, the searches again yielded more patient-related sites rather than those of interest to health professionals and there are more US rather than UK sites listed. I would feel more confident recommending health professional use sites like Digg, Citeulike or Biowizard as they retrieve articles, but I'm not sure how much benefit there is to sites that tagg articles over setting up alerts on databases, unless you are part of a community or network, where you know that other Paediatric nurses/diabetologists/paediatricians are selecting the articles.

Part 2
I can see the potential for social bookmarking in libraries for both library staff and groups of users; there are obvious uses for Clinical or subject librarians tagging sites or articles for different groups of users. Although I haven't invesitgated many of the sites tagged by other people on the course, I can appreciate that it is a very immediate method of alerting others to useful ideas. My limited searches highlighted for me the problems searching for material when so many different terms are used to describe subjects, where there is no indexing or thesuarus control. It is just as frustrating as ploughing through hundreds of entries in Google.