Luisa Guillemard on Using Diigo to Facilitate the Research Process

Hello, I’m Luisa Guillemard, and I’m a psychology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.  I want to share a tool that is very helpful for organizing your bookmarks and sharing them with others.  I’m talking about Diigo, a social bookmarking tool that is available for free in the Internet.

Rad Resource: Diigo is very versatile—it allows you to create a library of bookmarks that you can access from any computer or from your iPhone, if you install the application, which is also free. With Diigo, you can highlight text and make annotations (sticky notes), you can also preview the content of your bookmarks directly from your library.  It is possible to capture a section of a document or web page, as well as images or other media, saving it as a bookmark.  Another feature is that you can organize your bookmarks in several ways: you can tag them, write a description of each bookmark, and organize them into different lists.  The Diigo toolbar is excellent and a click over its “diigolet” saves your bookmark to your library; two clicks and the different saving options are displayed. As you can see, creating a library of bookmarks is very easy.

Hot Tip: You can also create groups for sharing bookmarks in a topic of interest. The feature of creating groups has become an important tool for my research and evaluation projects. Commonly, I open a group for each project I’m involved with.  For each group, I invite the participants of the project, which allows them to have access to the bookmarks I have added for that group. This also enables them to upload their own bookmarks, notes and tags.  What happens is that any of the members can contribute with Internet resources relevant to a project or program. This is great, because everyone collaborates with articles, web pages, and reports–all members share information!  You can also open your bookmarks to friends and other members of the Diigo community, which makes possible contributions to your library from other persons interested in your topic.

I really recommend Diigo as a useful research tool for your evaluation projects and for your personal use; visit www.diigo.com and download it, you won’t regret it.

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