CURLS site (social bookmarking) opens the door to new ways of organising bookmarks and categorising online teaching and learning resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed, method of classifying information. CURLS site indicates who created each bookmark and provides access to that person's other bookmarked resources, users can easily make connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag using tag clouds. In this way, the community of users over time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources -- something that has come to be known as a "folksonomy".

Tagging teaching and learning resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. CURLS site simplifies the distribution and sharing of teaching and learning resources, web links and other online reference lists among peers and students.

CURLS is an open source social bookmarking application that offers functionality similar to the popular web site del.icio.us. For this pilot CURLS has been modified to suit the needs of DET NSW teachers and students. The beta release of CURLS application has been integrated with the DET NSW Portal login for seamless access from within the department and through the DET NSW Portal at home.

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and "tagging" them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work, notifying users when a URL no longer functions. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

A bookmarklet is a tiny JavaScript application which you can add to the browser toolbar for a more convenient way of adding your favourite websites to CURLS.

Bookmarklets (buttons) are links you add to your browser's Bookmarks Toolbar. They are an easy way to post and view your bookmarks on CURLS. Only Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are supported in CURLS.

The following steps will help you to create Bookmarlet: "Post to Curls" in your browser.

Internet Explorer (** Please note - "Favorite Bar" is called "Links" in IE 6)

1. Make sure the Favorites toolbar is visible. If it is not, right click on any part of the menu bar and make sure the "Favorites Bar" is selected.
2. Right-click on the link above Post to Curls and select Add to Favorites...
3. Click YES when the following warning message "You are adding a favorite that might not be safe. Do you want to continue?" appears.
4. Go to the "Create in" field and select "Favorites Bar". This saves the bookmarklet in your browser Favorites toolbar.

Firefox

1. Make sure the Bookmarks toolbar is visible. If not, go to menu View > Toolbars
2. Drag the link above Post to Curls to your bookmarks toolbar.

Shortcut to Post to Curls for a more convenient way of adding your favourite websites to CURLS. If you have already created Post to Curls bookmarklet in your Bookmarks/Favorite menu, then:

1. Go to the desired site, select Bookmarks for Firefox or Favorites for IE
2. Click on the Post to Curls link
3. The CURLS Add a Bookmark page will be opened and the link to your website will be populated to in the Address field.
4. Update the title, description and tags as required
5. Click on the Add Bookmark button to store this in on CURLS.

1. Go to http://www.curls.edu.au/import.php/
2. Click on the link provided https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all? to log in to the del.icio.us export API page.
3. When the page loads it will prompt you to enter your del.icio.us username and password. After successful authentication del.icio.us generates the xml file.
   NB: that sometimes del.icio.us export API page is not available on first click. Therefore, it may require you to refresh the page till it renders correctly.
4. Save the resulting XML file to your computer
5. Go back to CURLS site Import page then, Click Browse... to find this file on your computer. The maximum size the file can be is 1MB.
6. Select the default privacy setting for your imported bookmarks.
7. Click Import to start importing the bookmarks; it may take a few minutes.

1. Export your bookmarks from your browser to a file:
   
   
   • Internet Explorer: File > Import and Export... > Export Favorites as a .html or .htm file
   • Mozilla Firefox: Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks... > File > Export as a .htm or .html file...
   • Safari: File > Export Bookmarks... > Export as a .htm or .html file...
2. Click Browse... to find the saved bookmark file on your computer. The maximum size the file can be is 1MB.
3. Select the default privacy setting for your imported bookmarks.
4. Click Import to start importing the bookmarks; it may take a minute.

Note: If you do not want to export all of your bookmarks you can edit the exported .html file in a text editor (for example Notepad) to remove the unwanted bookmarks or import them all into CURLS and delete the ones you do not want.

• Public bookmarks are available to anyone, including guests that are do not have a DET Portal login.
• Private bookmarks are available only for view by you.
• The purpose of the Watchlist is to select and review another user's public links.
• Shared with Watchlist is available to registered users only.
• To add a user to your Watchlist, select username from all links (point the browser to http://www.curls.edu.au/bookmarks.php/username, where username is the users website name), and then click on the Add to Watchlist link on the sidebar. After adding someone\s bookmarks to your Watchlist the individual bookmark can be copied to your own bookmarks. To view all/selected user links, click on Watchlist link on the top toolbar.
• To delete another user's bookmarks from your Watchlist click on username then click Remove from Watchlist option of the Actions box.
• When you add a bookmark containing a link to an audio file in MP3 or Ogg format, website places a tiny player icon next to it, and you can play the file without leaving the site.
• There is a Firefox user extension that allows adding bookmarks directly from within the browser. Users that prefer other browsers can take advantage of bookmarklets that take you directly to the website Add bookmark interface. Simply click on the Add a bookmark link and drag the Post to website bookmarklet to the browser's Bookmarks Toolbar.