Tagging the catalog

Finally, and briefly, I want to look at an example of what I have been waiting through this whole blog project to see. The University of Michigan Library integrates tagging into its catalog. To navigate to this tool from the homepage, all you have to do is a search (say, a keyword search for “fudge”), and scroll to the bottom of the entry page for the tag cloud. At the bottom, there will either be a cloud of tags or a message inviting you to click to be the first to add a tag. In multiple entries, I found that there were no tags yet.

Another way to find the tagging tool, is to go to the “I need to find…” section, and choose a category. The category page has a tagging tab (conveniently “branded” with a store tag icon). I chose “All tags” from this drop-down menu, which took me to the MTagger page. This page displays all used tags in a cloud but also has an alphabetical tag browsing option. This alphabetical option, would increase usability for the user new to tagging and tag clouds. I was able to find an entry that did have tags by navigating to it from the tag cloud.

Another helpful tool that the library has added to each entry is the user descriptions. Users can add personal descriptions about the item and share them on the OPAC. The tagging and the user descriptions (which don’t seem to be searchable, but would still be helpful when doing research) add to the value of the existing classification and taxonomies.  Given that both tools are fairly young, I also had a hard time finding any entries that already have user descriptions.  I do think that this will catch on, though.  I would definitely use it, and it would be easy for a user new to the tool to figure out, since it is just like adding a quick comment, and works with the regular library login.

The library does have RSS feeds, so the tagging is not alone in the UM Libraries “Web 2.0″ world. I think that tagging fits in with any library that has an OPAC on its website. Tagging in the catalog just allows the users to add (and access) another dimension of search capability. I would definitely make use of searching through tags (once there were more entries tagged), but alongside my use of the traditional cataloging tools, keywords, LCSHs, classification, and taxonomies.

As my blog concludes, I feel I’ve learned a lot about what is currently going on in libraries to address changes in technology and to incorporate burgeoning “Web 2.0″ tools. I’m not sure I’ve become a lasting blogger but I have found some new blogs to add to my personal feeds. I’ll be keeping my eye on updates that mention tagging and social bookmarking in the library.

PennTags, folksonomies, social bookmarking

I don’t think I can talk about tagging and social bookmarking in libraries without looking at PennTags. PennTags is a project of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. According to the “About” page at the PennTags site:

PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your favorite online resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain URLs, links to journal articles, and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat, our online video catalog. Once these resources are compiled, you can organize them by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by grouping them into projects, according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used collaboratively, because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite online resources.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am not usually impressed by the options that OPACs give me for saving selected records. I have been praising the del.icio.us option in the OPAC as a much better way to handle those records I want to save to refer to later (especially the electronic ones). Now, I’ve come up with a complaint about del.icio.us on this front. It has surfaced as a result of my new love for the (still progressing) PennTags.

With del.icio.us, I can save sites to my account and tag them for later searches, so that I can (hopefully) find them again when I need them. Mostly, my sites for a given research project would be lumped together in a temporal chunk, but what if I do a little research now, a little more in a week or so, switch to another assignment for a week, then return to my research? My sites for that one project will be sprinkled among any other sites I’ve tagged in the intervening weeks. Why? Because del.icio.us orders my sites by the most to least recently tagged. There is currently no way to categorize my tags or order them alphabetically or (gasp) classify them is some way for later browsing. del.icio.us seems to be all search and no browse.

I’m starting to think that this clump of sites I’d tagged may have contributed to my getting overwhelmed with the process so many many months ago, and giving up. Now I’m looking at PennTags. It has solved this problem. Sort of.

PennTags invites users to tag sites and resources in folders called, projects. The projects are classifications of sorts. They are categories given to the group of sites by the user. The problem would arise if I have a different idea of what your category means than you do, but, let’s face it, that’s the same problem we have with traditional classification, subject headings, categories. I can browse in projects that seem to be similar to my topic of research. This browsing is what sets PennTags apart for me.

In a contribution (“PennTags – When card catalogs meet tags“) to the collaborative blog, Many-to-Many, David Weinberger explains:

Integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy) instantaneously provides the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

My guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, as the folksonomy supplements it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for “recipes” takes you to the “cuisine” category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here’s the tag cloud for the node you’re browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Weinberger nails what I find so exciting about the phenomenon of tagging. There are, of course, possibilities for corruption, or sub-par terms, but those can be ignored. With the tag cloud, those anomalies will be the small print that we can choose to ignore. As with the del.icio.us example, tagging and the resulting folksonomies do not do well to completely replace existing taxonomies and classification systems, but it does a good job of complementing them.

What about the findability and usability of PennTags? Starting from the Penn Libraries homepage, there is a link directly to the PennTags site. In a quick keyword search through the catalog (good old “fudge”), and the entry includes a link at the bottom to add to PennTags. Once at the PennTags site, you can browse, alphabetically, by project, by tag, or by user (if you happen to know that a user is learned in an area you are researching, perhaps). Clicking on a tagged site will take you (in a new window, yay) to the record or the resource at Penn Libraries (or to the site if it is an external website). As Weinberger mentions, you are then free to use the traditional classification and taxonomies offered by the catalog.

I am new to PennTags. I know how social bookmarking normally works and I’m pretty tech saavy compared to some. Yet, I had a hard time finding any information on the PennTags site to help me get started. I actually gave up trying to find any kind of help menu and decided to see what the site said about the project itself. This plan brought me to click on “about” at the top right corner of the homepage. Ahhhhh…the help area. For some reason, the help and getting started information in under “about.” Weird because once you click on “about”, the page title says you are at “PennTags/help“. Go figure.

The new user might be confused by the about-help issue, and by the tag cloud at the top of the homepage. Once the help area is tracked down, it gives comprehensive instructions for using PennTags and for starting new projects. Going through the instructions might be more than a new user is looking to do while researching through the catalog. I’m pretty sure that if I’d clicked on the “Add to PennTags” at the bottom of a catalog entry without prior knowledge, I would have taken only look at the homepage and closed the tab. It doesn’t present itself as a user-friendly tool for new users, especially those unfamiliar with social bookmarking in general.

That said, knowing what I know, I would use PennTags if I went to PennU. I like the way it can organize multiple projects of research. I like the possibilities it holds for the future as well. I think a great many of us will have our eye on where the project goes over the coming years.

del.icio.us and Clouds at K-State Libraries

Taking a look at the K-State Libraries homepage, I found that they have an RSS feed, but I didn’t see any evidence of the K-State Libraries blog. I even looked at the site index and searched “blog” on the site. I couldn’t find any direct and obvious links to the blog as a whole. I think this is too bad since the blog is well kept up and informative. Unfortunate that many people won’t be liable to stumble onto it, or even find it if they know about it.

Finally, I tracked it down. Under “About the Libraries” on the homepage, I clicked on “more about us…” and that took me to a page that listed “Library blogs” as a link. Whew! It’s not very simple to find, but I’m not very simple, either.  Given that the library has a blog, I wasn’t surprised to find that it is using other “Web 2.0″ technologies (and formats) as well.

The blog doesn’t use tags, but they have chosen to display their categories as a cloud. I find this interesting because it is kind of the opposite of what I mentioned in my post about the MIT virtualref del.icio.us page. Where the virtualref del.icio.us page has the tags in list format, resembling the familiarity of category lists, the K-Libraries blog uses the cloud for categories, resembling tagging. I find the cloud inviting and informative in an intuitive way. I automatically know roughly how many blogs are in certain categories as compared to others by glancing at the difference in type size and boldness.  Click on the link to the blog above, or see screenshot below:

I suppose that a user who is new to the idea of tagging and tag clouds might find this format a bit bewildering. It might look more like a wordart project than a list of categories. I think that mousing over the terms, and clicking on a couple would clarify their purpose, though. It may still not be clear what the difference in type-size and boldness refers to. Either way, I like the borrowing from the tagging world for formatting traditional categories.

Looking into the OPAC (I always like to see what a keyword search for “fudge” brings up), I noticed that there is an option right in the entry to tag the item in del.icio.us. The link opens the del.icio.us login page in a new window. (Kudos on targeting it to a new window, avoiding one of my pet peeves).

I’m not a del.icio.us user. I tried when it first hit the market, but I found it too much work to keep it up. Actually, I think my issue was that I was encouraged to set up an account by a friend and fellow poet. She was looking forward to creating a small community of poets and writers who could share their links with each other and enrich each other’s lives, poetry, etc. I felt kind of stressed to keep hunting for, and tagging new and interesting literary sites. It overwhelmed me and I gave it up, never turning back, until now.

Usually, there is some sort of way on an OPAC to save the items you find. I find that you can then save them to file, print them, or email them to yourself. All of these ways seem to reformat the entries so that I find them difficult to read. I think it is so much better to be able to set up a del.icio.us account and then tag the entries in there. That way they can be organized however I want. I could also share them with other students who might benefit from my research in future assignments. I like the idea. I would use this tool if I found it in an OPAC.

The K-State Libraries seem to be concerned about adapting to new technologies with their blog and RSS feed. I wasn’t surprised to find the link to del.icio.us, given the other technologies. I would suggest also setting up a del.icio.us account for the library. I think that is a great way to add to the library’s effectiveness as a place to look for information.