Tagging

I signed up for a del.icio.us account at my last co-op position, so I'm familiar with the social bookmarking and tagging phenomenom but it's been interesting to see the uses in other libraries. The one thing that was completely new to me was the bookmarklet, which to be honest I'm still not completely clear about! I took the walking tour of keene and it was pretty neato. I can see this technology being useful in libraries for mini instruction and training videos. I also downloaded Zotero onto my laptop and used it to make notes for this class. I would recommend it, it's useful because you can make notes about and tag websites (including online journal articles) so it's great for personal research. There are also in the development stages of creating a version that allows you to share your research with others and collaborate online. I can see the utility of this for students in university and college.

To speak about tagging in general, I've always been a little bit wary about the whole concept. I think the major issue for me is that it's really inconsistent in the fact that people use plurals and non-plurals, can mispell tags and use different words to convey the same meanings. Ironically I think that the last point is claimed to be the major benefit of tagging: not everyone uses the same language to signify an idea, so creating personal classification schemas is more useful for personal information retrieval. I think it's important to keep in mind that the "social" or sharing aspect of tagging is a secondary function- the first is a personal classification system, (see Lee Rainie).

Another issue that comes up when considering tagging is the idea that it is a more democratic way of organizing information. Instead of a select group of individuals (ex. librarians) deciding on a classification system (ex. dui), everyone can contribute equally. But I don't think this is necessarily true- I think that the early adopters can often set standards that others have to follow if they want their content to be relevant to others. For example, if a particular tag is the most popular one used to signify an idea then other tags for the same idea can be marginalized and not added to the greater "pool" of knowledge. Nevertheless, I would definitely have to agree that tagging is way more of a democratic system of classification than Dewey!