Thing 13 - Tagging

I know; I should have done this before Library Thing! The concept of 'non-hierarchical' organization is a bit foreign after years of MESH searching and of serving on the vocabulary task force for GeoRef - both of which are strongly based on hierarchy.

From an earlier post: Tags: these are so useful, so important. This has made me think a lot more deeply about classification, organization - back to my first cataloging job when I realized how important the perspective of the "findee" is.

Am becoming very enamored with the tag cloud concept. Visually appealing; a way to clarify relevance; and there is a hint of hierarchy(!).

Wonder if our OPAC allows user tagging? Will find out. It could certainly be used in addition to the subject headings (which I'm loathe to do away with, no harm in keeping) at least to see how the patrons are thinking about finding things. But our library collection is so small (few thousand books) that finding things isn't really a problem. Might be very useful in finding what medical libraries often call "consumer health" books for our families, because they rarely think in terms of MESH headings. Physicians, nurses, other care givers are usually at least exposed to it because of Medline searches.

I like the tagging concept, and I like the potential for patron involvement, for input from someone beside a cataloger that might make it easier for everyone to find things. But - since we all think so differently, it can't be the only answer. Even when my own Library Thing collection was only about 14 books, I already forgot how I tagged some things, and applied a different tag to things that I would later expect to find under the earlier tag... Consistency. Reproducible results. Guess that's why I'm so fond of controlled vocabulary after all these years. And why I teach it to our patrons - along with keywords, not instead of!