Browsing My Diigo: Over 200 African Folklore Books Online

Earlier this morning I wrote up a kind of technical post about integrating Diigo and Inoreader, and I thought I would also write up something more general here about Diigo and how my Diigo bookmarks might be useful to others.

Diigo is a bookmarking service that allows you to keep track of webpages. With a browser extension, you can bookmark webpages quickly and easily, adding tags to keep your bookmarks organized. You can put in some notes about the page (even very lengthy notes), and you can also snag images from the webpage so that thumbnail versions of those images appear in the Diigo bookmark.

So, for example, as I find online books or articles that I want to keep, I bookmark them quickly with a "dobib" tag that lets me know I need to come back to this bookmark later and do the actual bibliography work. Last night, I noticed a Ruth Manning-Sanders book at Internet Archive that will be useful to me later on, so I bookmarked it with the "dobib" tag. 

Now when I click on that bookmark in Diigo, it takes me to the Internet Archive webpage for that book

My African Folklore Book Collection at Diigo

That "dobib" bookmark is probably not useful to others (it's really just a note to myself to come back and work on that item later), but I have other bookmark collections that could be useful. 

For example, here are all the African books I have indexed in Diigo; the Diigo tag I use for that is #books:Africa. I just search on that tag in Diigo:

And then I can share those search results by copying and pasting the URL:

https://www.diigo.com/user/laurakgibbs?query=%23books%3AAfrica

ANYBODY can see those results. Just click on the link! You can then click on any of those bookmarks to go to the webpage I have set up for that book. (I use GoogleDocs to keep track of the books, and I then publish each GoogleDoc as a webpage.)

African Folklore Books ONLINE

You can also do more complex searches. For example, let's say you only want to see the African books that are available online. That means you would search on two tags: #books:Africa #onlinebooks. Here are those search results:

https://www.diigo.com/user/laurakgibbs?query=%23books%3AAfrica+%23onlinebooks

For me, this is really exciting: of the 336 African folklore books I have indexed, 229 of those books are available online! Just a click away, for anyone to read and enjoy. 

Most of the online books are at Internet Archive, although some are at other sources such as Hathi Trust or open access sources like Open Book Publishers.

Browsing at Diigo

So, you can use my Diigo bookmarks to browse all those African folklore books. Then, when you see one you are interested in, click on the Diigo link, and it will take you to my webpage, which in turn has the link you need to access the full-text book online.

For example, here's my Diigo bookmark for Barbosa. African animal tales:

When you click on that link it goes to my webpage. This is my workspace for a book, so as I write up summaries of the stories or do other work on the book, I update the GoogleDoc. For example, you can see here how I added a review of the book that I found at Publisher's Weekly.

And from that webpage you can use the borrowing link to hop right over to the Internet Archive, where the book is available for digital lending:

Diigo Searches

You can also do your own Diigo searches of my links! Even though you don't have a Diigo account, you can still browse and search my bookmarks like that (my public bookmarks; it's possible to have private bookmarks also, but I keep all mine public).

For example, let's say you, like me, are a fan of Harold Scheub. You can search for online books by Harold Scheub by putting in his last name plus the #onlinebooks tag, like this:

https://www.diigo.com/profile/laurakgibbs?query=Scheub+%23onlinebooks 

The search feature is off to the right as you can see in this screenshot: I put in the name "Scheub" to search for that text, but for #onlinebooks I included the hashtag sign because I want Diigo to search tags for that part of the search:

Or maybe, like my friend Hector, you are interested in hyenas; here's that search:

https://www.diigo.com/profile/laurakgibbs?query=hyena+%23onlinebooks

That's 55 books with at least one hyena story in them, all accessible online thanks to Internet Archive! Admittedly, this is not a full-text search; it's just searching the contents of the notes I have there in Diigo, but since I include the titles of the stories, that does mean you can find all the books with stories that have "hyena" in the title of the story:

Full-Text Search at Internet Archive

And then, inside Internet Archive, you can do full-text search, so that you can find all the hyenas in the book, not just the hyenas in story titles. For example, here's Phyllis Savory's Bantu collection available for digital checkout at Internet Archive; lots of hyenas in there, and Internet Archive lets you page through the search results just going from one hyena to the next to the next:

Isn't that amazing?

Over the past few years, I've been finding all kinds of ways to make Diigo super-useful to me in my work, and it's a beautiful added bonus that I can share all my Diigo resources with other people too!

And who knows: you might decide you want to start using Diigo also! :-)