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

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

If you think about it, tagging and folksonomies are already a part of our
library catalogs and search engines through the use of keywords.  People
doing keyword searching tend to find what they are looking for because of
words and phrases that are included in titles, descriptions, etc., as 
natural language, rather than using the controlled vocabulary of LCSH, 
etc.  Tagging is just the ability for people to add natural language 
keyword descriptors, and the fact that people are not adding them from a 
prescribed list makes them even more responsive to the logic and needs of 
the users of that resource.

Flickr and Furl are great playgrounds for this, and by "playground" I mean 
no disrespect.  But the same thing happens on academic sites like 
CiteULike.  They use the same now-common tag display as Flickr, etc., to 
show the most common tags, with the size showing the relative frequency.  
It's just that on CiteUlike, the tags include things like "drosophila" and 
"algorithm" and "classification."

dSpace also uses what could be called tagging.  Faculty members (or other 
members of an institution) upload articles, reports, Powerpoints, etc., 
usually only assigning a few keywords as descriptors.  Much faster than 
pushing all this material through the full cataloging process, and 
surprisingly effective, because people within a field tend to have a 
shared, evolving common terminology.

-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et at noblenet.org