Week 7: "Tag, you're it!" Why libraries should be "it".

I've found this week's topic to be really intriguing.  I've only recently (well, within the last year or so) gotten into the tagging thing but really hadn't thought about it too much.  Though I realized it was a very social thing to do, I really didn't connect it to LIS at all and Lee Rainie's article really showed me the ways in which tagging grew up from LIS.  It seems only reasonable that it come back to LIS, too, in that sense.

Unlike some of the other tools we've discussed this term; I see no great detriment in using tags whenever possible in libraries and their online presence.  To be sure, it would be useful for a librarian to be somewhat conservative with his or her tags, so that things are only described as appropriate and so that the tags are as specific as possible.  As we've seen (and I've discovered via my own tagging activities), it's very easy to create a huge, disorganized mess when you tag objects a lot, and use really vague or general tags.

One particular challenge that I've faced on del.icio.us is in using compound words/phases, since del.icio.us separates tags via spaces.  In some sense, I feel as though commas would be a more natural separator, and I've seen other sites (such as LiveJournal and this blog) which use a comma to denote a new tag.  Perhaps there's a technical reason behind it, but without the ability to use natural language tags, it seems to me that the same objects might actually wind up being tagged less, as different people will interpret how to create phrases differently (or instance, using a hyphen or dash versus simply removing the spaces altogether).  It just occurs to me that if Web 2.0 is supposed to be more natural to humans, then tags should be capable of emulating natural language better, if indeed the goal of tagging is to produce links between similar objects (which it would appear to be!).

Maybe I'm missing something...

But, as I mentioned, I see the utility for tagging in libraries, not just because we as librarians recognize the value of metadata, but also because it makes things easier for our own clients.  I can see great possibilities in combining tags with our existing forms of metadata to enable clients to not just find books or articles with specific key words, but also online documents and more general resources.  This technique coupled with appropriate information literacy training could allow clients to access both academic and popular resources both in-library and online with great ease.  For me, the client is ultimately the top priority, and as long as we can allow our clients to recognize bias in information, then there's no reason we shouldn't be able to set the World Wide Web loose in our catalogues.

Unfortunately, this is more of a pipe dream for me than it is a reality.  To be sure, though, I would love to see a day when all of our clients can diffrientiate fully between reliable and unreliable information and where we can give them wider access without having to worry about the adverse effect on their research!

I guess the same really applies for me in a classroom environment.  I can really see the benefit of tagging for classes and the usefulness for being able to share information easily, no matter the distance between students.  Using tagging, we've already seen the possibilities for collaboration (perhaps even debate) even across great distances.

So, in true full-circle fashion, I'll end where I began, that as long as we do social bookmarking and tagging "right", there's absolutely no reason to avoid giving it a comfortable place in libraries.