Making bookmarks more informative.
Our observation has been that people seem to know how to bookmark web sites and that is about it. Here are some additional capabilities that may make your use of bookmarks more productive.
1) Rename bookmarks - One of the long-term problems in working with bookmarks is interpreting the bookmark titles. The original bookmark takes on the title that the author has attached to the web site. Authors may use uninformative titles such as “Home Page” or even forget to attach a title. When you return to your list of bookmarks, these vague phrases are often not that helpful. Luckily, browsers allow you to replace the title provided by the author with a phrase you find more personally meaningful.
The method for doing this varies from browser to browser. The following example uses the Chrome browser. The image shows the result of selecting “edit” after opening up the “bookmark manager” from the menubar. You can see that the bookmark selected has a reasonable title, but it may mean nothing to you. This happens to be the title for what we describe as our “portal” - the page that provides access to the resources we have available online. Perhaps a phrase like “Grabe and Grabe Resources” might be more helpful to someone and this is what they might enter when editing.
Rename a bookmark in Chrome
2) Organization - After you have accumulated many bookmarks, scrolling through the list to find a bookmark so you can return to the associated web site becomes tedious. You need a way to organize your bookmarks. Browsers typically allow bookmarks to be collected in folders. Naming the folders - e.g., photography, biology I, recipes - also improves your efficiency when attempting to locate a bookmark you know you saved somewhere.
The following image shows the Chrome browser bookmark management view. With this view open, adding a folder is accomplished by using “Organize” to display a drop down menu and then selecting the “Add folder” option from this menu.
Add folder in Chrome
Bookmarks are added to folders by dragging. Use the mouse (hold the left button down) to drag the bookmark to the desired folder.