I think tagging in catalogs would help "browsability". A lot of the
catalogs I see are browsable, but unless you know the terminology (aka
subject headings) it can be difficult to find stuff without doing a search.
Tagging gives us a user created vocabulary that does a few things:
1) It gives them some interaction in what can very much be a come, get what
you want, and leave scenario (i.e. they search, they find, they leave) - it
makes your site more participatory
2) It creates links between people using common tags, making it a little
"social" as well as giving the library an idea of the types of words people
would actually search and browse by.
I would love to implement tagging for my consortial catalog, but we're not
quite there yet. I have begun to use tagging in other ways and I think it
is great; especially if you want to do a "mashup" or aggregate data from
multiple sources based on a tag.
I imagine some people see tagging as some trendy fad; maybe it is, but I
think it should be taken very seriously and people should really consider
implementing it. There are lots of discussions out there about storing tag
data and formulas for generating tag clouds.
--this message is a little late in the conversation. Eric had to hook me up
with the ability to post since I was trying to post from a diff address than
I registered with.
Chris
--------------------
Chris Deweese
Internet Applications Developer
http://www.lcls.org
Lewis & Clark Library System
425 Goshen Road, Edwardsville IL 62025
618-656-3216 x130
AIM: ChrisDeweese25
---------------------
Illinois Library Systems - 40 Years of Excellence
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 9:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] tagging
On Mar 8, 2006, at 2:29 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> 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?
Based on the responses, it sounds as if our small community believes
there are benefits to tagging, especially if the tags are not
necessarily anonymous. I will think about this some more, play with
del.icio.us some more, and consider incorporating this feature into
MyLibrary. Hmmm...
--
Eric "Off To Ann Arbor To Attend Cool Symposium" Morgan
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