#10: Tagging and Delicious

I love tagging, and I can see some wonderful potential for it within libraries. While controlled vocabulary (taxonomies) work in order to get precise information, I think they should work in tandem with tagging (folksonomies), especially within the OPAC. When users are in the OPAC, they don't necessarily know that to find books on World War II, they need to search "World War, 1939-1945" (even I have to look that up!). In addition, not all books have as precise subject headings as they can, especially fiction where many times the subject headings are dry and don't describe the contents at all. For instance, let's look at Shakespeare's classic Romeo and Juliet. One of the newer records in Santa Fe's system includes the following subject headings:

• Romeo (Fictitious character) -- Drama
• Juliet (Fictitious character) -- Drama
• Conflict of generations -- Drama
• Verona (Italy) -- Drama
• Vendetta -- Drama
• Youth -- Drama
• Tragedies.

One can't argue with these subject headings, but let's look at what LibraryThing users have tagged this book as:

16th century, adult, british, british literature, classics, death, drama, family, literature, love, plays, Romance, shakespeare, suicide, theatre, tragedies

These tags show a little bit more, especially the romance angle. I think a system where subject headings work in tandem with user-supplied tags has the best potential to maximize users' results. We can get the precise results, or we can see how users define a book--after all, users are our target audience.

While allows users to add tags to books in the catalog is great, there are some downfalls. What if no one adds any? And what if certain users like to use profanity or inappropriate tags? LibraryThing has a way of adding their tags into library OPACs; called LibraryThing for Libraries, I think it's a great way to get edited tags displayed within the OPAC.

You can really see the contrast in this catalog record from Bowdoin College for The Da Vinci Code. The given subject headings (Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519 -- Fiction; Grail -- Fiction; Cryptographers -- Fiction) do not adequately describe the book like the tags do (adventure art Catholic Church Catholicism Christianity conspiracy crime Da Vinci Dan Brown France grail historical fiction history Jesus Leonardo da Vinci Mary Magdalene mystery Opus Dei Paris religion Robert Langdon secret societies suspense Templars thriller).

Other systems allowing tagging within the OPAC include:

• Drupal (ex: Miami University - tag cloud)
• Primo (ex: Boston College - tag page)
• VuFind (ex: George Mason University - record)
• SOPAC (ex: Ann Arbor District Library - tag cloud)
• PennTags from the University of Pennsylvania

Now on to one of my absolute favorite tools, Delicious. I've been using this tool since it was the slightly hard to remember del.icio.us--now I'm quite glad it's the easier to remember delicious.com. I have over 3500 items tagged, and these items are all to help me and students when doing research. Unfortunately I only use it informally--there is no promotion or links to this. However, when I have someone come up and ask for information on a country, I go to my CountryInformation tag to show them good websites (after looking up books, of course!). I can also thread two of my tags together to create a type of Boolean tag search, for instance, http://delicious.com/djmatth2/Health+Statistics will give my sites that are tagged both Health and Statistics. I have bundled tags together to try to keep them straight (under my Art/Music bundle, for instance, are the following tags: Architecture, Art, Clothing/Fashion, Dance, Music, Photography, and SheetMusic).