Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Tag cloud in Pennsylvania
Every now and then I like to take a look at the tag cloud at the University of Pennsylvania's library. (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/). I think it's an interesting experiment, for several reasons.
For one thing, what the library is basically doing is allowing library users to re-catalog their holdings. Sure, the library has added subject headings to their catalog records, but the tags allow the library's users to add their own subject headings. That's an interesting notion: the organization of the metadata does not end when the library saves a catalog record, but continues as users actually use the records.
The reason I keep glancing at this page, however, is that the quality and quantity of the users' tags are interesting. You'll see a lot of odd tags, some tags that have probably been added several times by the same user in order to "inflate" the cloud, and other such things that librarians would consider to be junk. But there are also some useful tags in there. And interestingly, the more the tags are used, the more useful the tag cloud becomes.
So I can't resist peeking from time to time to see if this tag cloud might yet become a storm in the library world.
For one thing, what the library is basically doing is allowing library users to re-catalog their holdings. Sure, the library has added subject headings to their catalog records, but the tags allow the library's users to add their own subject headings. That's an interesting notion: the organization of the metadata does not end when the library saves a catalog record, but continues as users actually use the records.
The reason I keep glancing at this page, however, is that the quality and quantity of the users' tags are interesting. You'll see a lot of odd tags, some tags that have probably been added several times by the same user in order to "inflate" the cloud, and other such things that librarians would consider to be junk. But there are also some useful tags in there. And interestingly, the more the tags are used, the more useful the tag cloud becomes.
So I can't resist peeking from time to time to see if this tag cloud might yet become a storm in the library world.
