 |
 |
Although tagging is the hot new term for it, I remember reading about similar ideas way, way back in my undergraduate days. (Ok, that was only around four years ago, but still). I'd have to dig to get some of the research, but my overall impression is that there are a couple of qualities that could make tagging very useful: 1) Community tagging of all records 2) experts applying a hierarchal controlled vocabulary on top of the tagging being assisted by using various statistical analysis. This tends to be done somewhat poorly by community tagging. 3) Multi-word tags (with normalization applied in both directions) 4) Thesauri to map between tagging, similar concepts, and the controlled vocabulary. This is really an extention of point 2. I remember reading a study that indicated people don't like to use thesauri when they have to select it as an option but they like the results when it's done for them. (Think Google's suggestion to search term X instead of Y). 5) Use some statistical crunching of user-submitted reviews and information to suggest possible tag words. This can be tricky. In Spring 02 right after Google opened up their api I worked on a project with some other people that used somewhat circular logic that tried to find a combination of words from a webpage that would bring that page up in Google in the rankings. The idea was if the combination of words was first, it would be a decent description to find similar pages. The problem is if you did it too perfectly, it's likely to be nonsenical. (An old IR problem, forget the name.). For example, for many large hobby sites it was fine since it offered things like "model train", but for small sites with little content we got things like "steel factory singleton". In that case it was the home page of a professor who offhandly mentioned a trip to a steel factory. The professor rarely used words that would be the most useful, such as computer science. But it's useful to offer tips to human beings that can quickly throw out garabage like "steel factory" as a suggestion for the page. Of course, if you're asking for the nitty-gritty implementation details of what I would do....I'd have to think a little longer ;). But not too much. At it's heart it would just be an index. The statistical analysis could be harvested by playing around with the large body of IR research already out there. Ah, and lots of promoting to get the critical mass of people. I'm typed the response rather quickly, so sorry if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This stuff is part of the reason I got into library science so I get carried away on occasion. Jonathan T. Gorman Visiting Research Information Specialist University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana 216 Main Library - MC522 1408 West Gregory Drive Urbana, IL 61801 Phone: (217) 244-4688 On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: > 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 >