Thing #7

I read Elyssa Kroski's blog post (Kroski, Ellyssa, “The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging,” http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/) and I liked her discussion of the democratizing power of tagging. It seems like a method of organization that Sanford Berman would dig. People do have power. But are they using it?

I think that really effective use of tagging will come later. In library circles we say that everyone does it -- uses flickr and tags -- but I think that is just our peer group. We're librarians. We love to organize things. I'd like to see the Pollak Library catalog include user-generated tags. That would also be an additional wonderful way for students to access the databases. But I think that the best way to get students here to be comfortable creating tags is to have them do it as part of a class assignment or library instruction session. I think tagging would be an excellent way to make whatever will replace Research Guides or other finding aids more user-friendly. But I also don't want to see our lovely controlled vocabulary/hierchial subject headings go away. It's one of the ways I can help students find "all" the info we have on subjects I don't understand. I love those ERIC descriptors.

Here's the link to my delicious account: http://delicious.com/grrlibrarian