Eric,

I think it would be useful, in some places. Flickr only allows the
person submitting the photo to add tags. Much like an author submitting
something to D-Space could add keywords. Those terms, from an
uncontrolled source, can be useful in searching. Our catalogs allow for
this in field 653.

Del.icio.us allows anyone to tag anything. This works best with a large
collection of tags. Then clustering tools can group and distinguish
terms. A few scattered terms would not be much use, in general. Unless,
you had a small group who wanted to tag things for their own personal
information management uses. Dbtoread, might not be useful to anyone but
me, but it could be very useful to me. If there are folks who want to or
would use tagging for their own personal uses and they are important
users it could make sense.

Freetag is an open-source tool to use with MySQL databases to add
tagging. There was some talk of using this to add tags to Koha. Not sure
if it was ever done.

Sincerely,
David Bigwood
[log in to unmask]
Lunar & Planetary Institute
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/whats_new.shtml



-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 1:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] tagging

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to chat with a friend about
"tagging" -- a sort of self- keyword cataloging as implemented by
del.icio.us and flikr.

I'm wondering, to what degree does this group here think tagging would
be beneficial in Library Land? For example, we could allow tagging to be
done against items in a library catalog or against a personalized
collection of Internet resources. If it were beneficial, then how would
y'all implement it?

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame