[Web4lib] del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites -- WHY DO IT?

[Breakall, Scott]

In addition to being an alternative to search, folksonomies are a way
for users to add their feedback to an item's metadata.  This could be a
useful feature of a library catalog.

Back in January, Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian created a mockup
of a tag interface to her library's catalog (see the blog entry and the
image here
http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2005/01/21/swan_tags.html).

The mockup looks similar to the del.icio.us tag cloud
(http://del.icio.us/tag/), the Flickr Popular Tags
(http://flickr.com/photos/tags/), the Yahoo! News Tag Soup
(http://yahoo.theherrens.com/), etc., showing popular tags in a
database, with more popular tags denoted with larger fonts.  This would
be a very cool jumping off point for browsing through a library catalog
(hat tip to Karen Coyle for her point a few messages back about
"serendipity").

However, most tags do not need to be limited to subject tags, as most of
the tags are in Ms. Levine's example are -- users could use tags such as
"dry humor", "great dialogue", "bad acting", "brooding", "exuberant",
"chainsaw murder", etc.  This could be a way for users of a library
catalog to communicate with each other about the content of an item they
have read, watched, or listened to.

~Scott~


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Patricia F
Anderson
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 12:30 PM
To: Drew, Bill
Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites -- WHY DO
IT?

<snip>
I see the folksonomy tools being an excellent way to locate a special
search 
engine or bookmark collection on a topic that is of new interest to you 
when you want to come up to speed quickly, and without wasting time 
sorting for quality links. I also use Teoma for the same purpose.
<snip>