[Web4lib] Libraries that support user tagging in OPAC?

[Lars Aronsson]

Steve Lawson wrote:

> I got this comment on my blog today from Michael Winkler w/r/t 

> > http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/voyager/1039
> > Please send comments on how catalog tags should be expressed.

There are 2540 Penntags all together, owned by 203 users. The top 
three users have 474, 353, and 161 tags, respectively.  Only 20 
users have more than 25 tags.  Half of the users only have one tag 
each.

I only read through a small minority of the annotated tags.  Some 
were about online resources, but most seem to be about books.

I saw one annotation that mentioned a difference between two 
editions of a book, http://tags.library.upenn.edu/url/3383
but most tags seemed to be about the work, rather than editions.

I didn't find any that commented on the catalog or the contents of 
the bibliographic record, as opposed to the catalogued book.  You 
could imagine a tag for "hilarious mistakes in book cataloguing".
That will certainly come when more librarians start adding tags.

In a FRBR catalog, you would have different records for works, 
editions, and physical copies.  Users would have to be careful to 
tag at the right level.  This physical copy has page 14 torn out, 
but other copies don't. This edition has a spelling error on page 
14, but other editions don't.  This work fails to mention the 
World Wide Web, because it was written in 1985.

At Amazon.com, user reviews and URLs are tied to ISBN numbers, but 
behind the scenes Amazon is also connecting ISBN numbers that 
represent different editions and reprints of the same work.  You 
don't have to resubmit your review for the paperback edition.

A useful collection of tags (or user reviews) should connect to
stable identifiers. For physical copies, this is the barcode or 
RFID label, but this is probably the least interesting level for 
user comments.  For editions of recent books, it is the ISBN 
number.  For editions before 1960 that don't have ISBN and for 
works, there are no good identifiers.  You might want to connect 
tags to Library of Congress call numbers, but then you have to be 
able to connect back to your own bibliographic records.

Once such a connection to stable identifiers exists, the same 
collection of tags or reviews can be reused for just about any 
library catalog or online bookstore.  So the rest is an issue of 
who controls the collection, how successful are they are to 
attract contributors, and how are others (e.g. commercial 
booksellers) allowed to reuse the collection.  It has been 
suggested (about half a dozen times) that a collection of reviews 
should be built within the Wikimedia Foundation.  If such a 
project were started, I think it would get more than 200 users and 
2500 annotated tags in a very short time.

For Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish books, the bibliographic record 
IDs at the national library catalogs of Sweden (Libris), Norway 
(Bibsys) and Denmark (bibliotek.dk) are useful stable identifiers.  
It is quite safe to assume that every edition of every book ever 
printed in these languages has a bibliographic record of its own.

At Project Runeberg, we don't "tag" books, but we digitize them.  
We try to link to these Scandinavian bibliographic records, as you 
can see from the orange "MARC" logo-links in our catalog, 
http://runeberg.org/katalog.html
For some works we link to all three library catalogs, e.g. 
http://runeberg.org/ibsen/
When we digitize, we aim to reproduce a perfect copy of a 
particular edition.  Since there is (in most cases) a 
bibliographic record for each edition, we have matching levels.
Currently these library catalogs link back to us only in a few 
exceptional cases.  We hope that will improve any decade soon.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/