[Web4lib] Libraries that support user tagging in OPAC?

[Drew, Bill]

Users can find books in our library by using Google, Google Scholar, and
OpenWorldCat. They can also find us via various other union catalogs.
They do not need to come to our catalog.  I think the legal issue is a
non-issue.

Wilfred (Bill) Drew
E-mail: mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin)
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Lars Aronsson
> Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 1:16 PM
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Libraries that support user tagging in OPAC?
> 
> 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?
>