#17 Tag! You're it!

Many of us in libraries are familiar with taxonomies. The taxonomy created by the Library of Congress effects how we catalog the library's items, where we put them on the shelves, and how our customers find and retrieve these items. Library of Congress subject headings are implemented from the top down, meaning that updating the vocabulary to reflect new concepts or terms or changing subject headings to more commonly used terminology can be a lengthy process.

Conversely, folksonomies (a blend of the words folk - "people" and taxonomy) are created from the bottom up. Terms are applied by anyone who tags an item. The idea is that a folksonomy will use terms that people actually use.

The tags that are used in sites we have explored like Flickr, LibraryThing, and Del.icio.us create a folksonomies of terms that individual users can use privately or choose to share with other users.

Some libraries are already exploring ways of letting their customers add their own tags to their catalogs and share these tags with other library customers. PennTags at the University of Pennsylvania has gotten a lot of attention lately; the Ann Arbor District Library is also starting to make use of customer-generated tags in its catalog.

Tag Clouds

Have you heard the term "tag cloud"? A tag cloud is a visual depiction of a user's or site's tags. Tags are weighted so that those that are used more often appear larger than those that are used less often.

Take a look at the tag cloud for LibraryThing. Notice all the different terms people are using, and how some of these user-generated tags might help visitors find items... and how some tags might actually separate like items from one another.

Adding Tags in Blogger

Blogger lets you add tags to your blog posts (although it calls them labels). To get an idea of what this looks like, take a quick look at the Booked in Saint Paul blog. Notice the labels down the left side of the screen and at the bottom of each post.

To add labels to your blog posts, look for the space at the bottom of the form marked Labels for this post. You can enter whatever labels you like, separating each label with commas. Labels can be a single word or multiple-word phrases.

If you have entered labels for your earlier blog posts, you can also click the "show all" link to display a list of labels you've used previously. From there, you can click on the labels to add them.

Discovery Resources

Folksonomy by Daniel H. Pink - short article from the New York Times 2005 Forum: The Year in Ideas.

Folksonomies Tap People Power by Daniel Terdian - article from Wired about how tags are being used in Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, and other sites.

Tags & Folksonomies - What are They, and Why Should You Care? - a good introduction to the concept, with lots of links to examples and other articles.

Discovery Exercise

1. What do you think about tagging and folksonomies? What might be the effects of this trend in the Library? Create a blog post and share your ideas.

2. Label your blog post.

3. Return to some previous blog posts you have made and add a few labels to your posts.

To go back to your older posts in blogger:

Sign in to your blog and click Manage Posts.

From the list of posts, select the ones to which you want to apply a label; then click Label Actions.

Select New Label, enter your label in the pop-up box, and click OK. If successful, you will see the label appear next to the post's title, and a list of your labels will appear on the left side of the screen.

Alternatively, you can edit each post individually by clicking Edit in front of the post's title, entering your labels, and re-publishing your post.

OPTIONAL:

4. Learn how to tag your posts with Technorati tags so they can join tag searches.

You may also want to consider claiming your blog and creating a watchlist.

Coming up next: Different perspectives on Library 2.0 and Web 2.0