Review & retag
I have now reviewed all tags in my blogs and added a lot more which will hopefully describe the contents a bit better.
The Ann Arbor District Library uses tags within its library catalogue and I wonder how helpful users find these? With Aquabrowser, there will be Word Clouds available for each record which will encourage readers to explore other records and broaden their search. Will the Word Cloud have the same role as tags?
An interesting statement in the BBC link which Emma offered as further reading said that adding tags "is a classic example of how the web is enabling the bottom-up building of categories rather than having such things imposed on users." As Librarians we are used to working with controlled vocabulary when cataloguing material, but by adding and using tags in blogs, delicious, etc, we are suggesting, through our own personal preferences, how an item should be categorised. Tagging can be quite a powerful tool...
I'm sceptical about tags for library catalogues, partly because they rely on users doing a lot of work. I'm far more impressed by the type of OPAC recommendations that Dave Pattern is automatically generating at Huddersfield.
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