SL2.0 Guides: Tagging

In libraries, subject cataloging is a process of determining and recording the subject contents of a resource so that it may be assigned subject heading keywords. Traditionally, this has been the realm of professional librarians who have studied both the art and the science of cataloging. With Web 2.0, however, the general public can participate in an informal cataloging process known as a folksonomy. This practice, named for it being a public version of a traditional taxonomy. Folksonomies don’t use a controlled vocabulary of subject headings like LCSH or Sears, but rather user-defined tags.

So what exactly are tags, and what do they do for us?
Tags, as noted above, are simple and informal subject keywords normally applied to an online resource. Unlike subject headings, which admitedly are often more technically correct, tags are more likely to be informally right. So there it is… Correct vs. Right. Kind of like the old bit about Precision vs. Recall. You can either formulate a search that will be precise to a narrow topic definition, or one that will recall the most number of hits – but not both. Sure there is a middle ground, but the inverse relationship between precision and recall makes this a serious compromise on the effecicacy of both.

In terms of this conversation, subject headings are more likely to be correct, but less likely to be right while tags are more often right, but not always correct. LibraryThing, one of my favorite online library resources, has released a new blog – Thing-ology which will explore the subject of tagging. The first post on the subject this weekend provides a great example of the correct vs. right relationship.

Take Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, for example. The top tags include queer and gay fiction, whereas the subject headings are City and town life > Fiction, Humorous stories and San Francisco (Calif.) > Fiction. Someone looking for Tales of the City is unlikely to start their search under City and town life > Fiction (San Francisco, however, might prove a good access point, which is also highlighted in the tags). [Thing-ology]

City and town life > Fiction, Humorous stories is certainly a very correct and precise subject heading, but gay fiction as a tag may be more right in provoking higher recall. The Thing-ology post goes on to clarify, as I have above, that subject headings are certainly more suited to browsing a subject area because the controlled vocabulary collocates resources.

How are tags used?
Web 2.0 has brought a number of websites where you can create a bookmark list and “tag” your bookmarks into categories. These sites are refered to as social bookmarking. The name comes from the public sharing of bookmarks. One of the largest of these sites is del.icio.us – which is actually a clever url on the .us domain (so it really is http://del.icio.us that you type into the address bar!).

These social bookmarking sites tend to provide a number of common features:

1. The ability to “bookmark” and save sites
2. An annotation field to jot down notes about the site
3. The ability to “tag” sites with informal subject keywords
4. A way to search the database of tags for matches on a term
5. A way to view all the sites for a single tag
6. On most sites, anything you bookmark and tag is public – anyone else can see what you are sharing. This is the “social” in social bookmarking. The thought is that collective intellegence and a mob of taggers will be more successful at finding the good stuff than a single person or a search engine computer algorithim
7. Some sites let you specify private bookmarks that are not visable to anyone else
8. Most of the sites give you an RSS feed to receive updates from any new bookmarks you add to your collection or that are added by a friend or that have a specific tag

There is a great review of Del.icio.us available from Andy Carvin’s new PBS blog, learning.now.

A nice printout on social bookmarking can also be downloaded from EduCause.

Posted in guide, infomancy | 4 Comments »