My Yard
Friday, October 7, 2011
Tagging
I can see that tagging could be a very useful tool for libraries. If you have patrons of a library tag books in a electronic system it may become easier to search for books that are similar to the ones they have already enjoyed. This like most systems has a down side. I for one, am unlikely to be able to resist the temptation to put in an odd tag on a book such as lobster or orchard when the book has nothing to do with either thing. This although amusing would not help you in your search for a book about apple orchards. The solution to this problem would be to make the librarians responsible for the tags which would be time consuming and would negate the social aspect of the tagging. The bookmarking site that I looked at in order to learn about tagging Delicious.com didn't seem to have too many people like me who when asked for a tag for a site on making cupcakes that look like the stars of musical theatre would write in the word Rasputin. This may be because of the vast number of users and the lowered chances that one tag of Rasputin on a cooking site would have any effect. So the Solution to the mistagging problem would be to have many people participate and have the tags only show up if they have been suggested multiple times.
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I am growing more and more frustrated with Delicious.com. I just typed bear mace into the search engine and found very little interesting. If I typed in bear mace or bear repellent spray into Google or YouTube, I would find much more interesting videos and information about it. As for libraries I just think that there are too many better ways to find information than using tagging, such as internet search engines or library databases.
ReplyDeleteI think it was while I was researching something else that I came across an article about tagging in the children's section of the library, although it may have been mentioned in a class. The idea was that it is actually in bad practice to tag in that section because if a child thinks they are bad at math they will never go to the section labeled math to explore in the library and may miss out on new interests. Similarly, if a child enjoys earth science they may never stray from that section therefore closing themselves off from many other types of books. I thought it was interesting and that's why it stuck with me. Your post about mistagging made me think of it. I, like others, would probably miss your post on cupcakes because I was not searching for the word you tagged it under and it might've been exactly what I was looking for.
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