+ Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us (via Library Journal)
We've had many things to say about tagging on RS. Many of them very recently in this post from earlier this month. Our usual caveat is that tagging for small groups (let's say a group of students in a class) is much different than for the masses. Make sure to read Dan Giancaterino's comments at the bottom of this post.
We would have like to have read how some of these libraries handle or will handle tag spam? Adult terms and links? Duplicates? Pluralization, etc. Why Del.icio.us vs. other services like MyWeb2.0 also from Yahoo with more features? Why no mention of specialty tagging services like Connotea aimed at scientists? What are they doing for those who don't tag, have no interest in tagging, etc. What happens if/when another service comes along that works better? What's the investment in tagging in terms of time and effort especially if tagging doesn't grown to reach more people? Our wish is that info pros would take a small amount of time (we're talking minutes here folks) and use it to promote/market what libraries have to offer from virtual reference to remotely accessible databases (offering free full text content) to audiobooks for Internet download to MOST IMPORTANTLY, the skills we offer.
Finally, what's wrong with allowing documents/search results (from any database) to speak for themselves and then offer TAG CLOUDS based on those results as a way to discover what might be otherwise missed content? This is precisely what Clusty Clouds offer as a Clusty Labs experiment. Example: Nashville Music or Shakespeare
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