[Web4lib] Help Us Explore Findability Through Tagging!

[Cornwall, Daniel D (EED)]

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging
government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and
needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing
Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the
Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many
people as possible tag and describe these documents using the
del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and
instructions on how to participate, please visit
http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a
sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

This project got its inspiration from Galaxy Zoo
(http://www.galaxyzoo.org), an astronomy project which has a database of
1 million galaxies that researchers asked regular folks to classify as
ellipical, clockwise spiral, or anticlockwise spiral. They aimed for and
got at least 20 classifications per galaxy. If a particular galaxy was
classified a certain way by 80% of users who assigned a classification
to that galaxy, that classification was accepted. This "person on the
street" data was compared with a small subset (50,000) of galaxies that
professional astronomers had managed to classify on their own. The
researchers found that there was pretty much total agreement between the
professional and amateur assessments. Documents are more complex than
galaxies. :-) , but if 9 out of 10 people tag an epa document as air
quality, then it's probably about air quality.

So please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging and get started. And
tell your friends, coworkers and especially any environmental
professionals that you know to get involved. Also, if you have a network
in del.icio.us, we'd appreciate you putting on a "for:[friend name]" tag
for every member of your del.icio.us network.

The more people involved with this project, the better the descriptions
and the more robust the subject access provided by the tagging will be.
At least that's our hope.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI
volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.
B) How many documents were tagged.
C) How many documents were described.
D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given
document. We will make our compilations publicly available along with
any analysis we have.

Hope to see you on del.icio.us soon making environmental documents
easier to find and easier to digest!

=================================

Daniel Cornwall
Head of Information Services 
Alaska State Library 
PO Box 110571
Juneau, AK 99811-0571
(907) 465-1315 ph
(907) 465-2665 fax
E-Mail: dan.cornwall at alaska.gov

Learn what the Alaska State Library can do for you by visiting
http://library.state.ak.us.
 
Learn about the Alaska State Publications Program, a system that works
to make state information available to Alaskans now and in the 22nd
Century. See our web page at <http://library.state.ak.us/asp/asp.html>.
 
Any opinions expressed in this e-mail are mine alone and not those of my
employer unless explicitly stated.