[Web4lib] Libraries that support user tagging in OPAC?

[Lars Aronsson]

Bill Drew wrote:

> Good thoughts but if tagging is to be useful as a discovery tool 
> don't tags need to be housed outside of the library at sites 
> such as del.icio.us?  Otherwise users have to go to your catalog 
> to find the place to search by tags.  That would mean changes in 
> URLs would cause problems.  I see tags as needing to be outside 
> of the catalog.

Tags or not, your users have to go to your catalog to find books 
in your catalog, unless your catalog website was built to be 
indexed by anybody.  You can find Amazon.com customer reviews 
through Google or Yahoo because the amazon.com website was built 
to be indexed by Google and Yahoo.  Amazon.com could add tagging 
functionality to their own website, or the tagging could be done 
from an external website such as del.icio.us.

Far more important than where it is housed, is the legal issue of 
who owns and controls the collection of tags or metadata.  If 
users are invited to add to the collection ("harnessing the 
collective intelligence of the users", as Tim O'Reilly put it in 
today's webcast from Ann Arbor), whether that is tags at 
del.icio.us, reviews at amazon.com, or encyclopedic articles at 
wikipedia.org, will they later be charged a fee to access the 
collection they helped to build?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se