1. Tagging/Folksonomies Think Tank Session April 8, 2008

2. What are tags?

• Keywords/descriptors to describe digital objects

• Applied by users of the content

• Keyword or category label. Tags help you find photos which have something in common. (Flickrs explanation of tags)

• Del.icio.us ' explanation of tagging

3. What is a folksonomy?

• Collaboratively creating and managing tags

• Freely chosen keywords used instead of controlled vocabulary

• Folksonomy is most notably contrasted with a taxonomy - done by users, not professionals.

4. Tagging vs. folksonomy

• Tags are the descriptors applied to objects

• Folksonomies are the collections of descriptors (metadata) created by users and applied to objects

5. This photo was given the tags house building colors, along with others

6.

• The tags for that image are part of a folksonomy

7. Advantages of tagging/folksonomies

• Simple to use - no complex structure to learn

• Lower cost of categorization

• Open-ended

• Relevance - user's own terms.

• Support serendipitious form of browsing.

• Easy to tag any object - photo, document, bookmark

• Better than no tags at all.

• People want to tag.

8. Disadvantages

• Quality of the tags

• Dont work well for finding

• No structure or conceptual relationships

• Issues of scale

• Personal tags or popularity tags

• Most people cant tag very well

• Errors, misspellings, etc.

9. Tags vs. subject headings

• LibraryThing's explanation of tags and subject headings

• An academic take on LibraryThing tags

10. Lets do some tagging

11. What tags did you give the photo?

• Cats

• Dogs

• Family

• Papa

• Food

• Gris

• Cats

• Together

12.

13. What can we do with tags?

• Del.icio.us

• Flickr

• LibraryThing

14. Other sites using tagging

• Last.fm

• Amazon

15. Tag Clouds Find this at Geeksugar

16. OCLC's TagCloud Builder

17. Firefox add-on

18.

19.

• Steve - Social Tagging of Art Museum Collections

20. Library applications of tagging

• • King County Aquabrowser

• • Ann Arbor District Library tagging

• • LibraryThing for Libraries

• • PennTags

• • Teen Web - Nashville Public Library

• • LibMarks

• • del.icio.us libraries

• • WorldCat Identities

21. More Library applications

• OCLC FictionFinder

• Connotea

• lib.rario.us - social media cataloging

22. Resources

• Pew Internet Life Project: Report on Tagging

• TagsAhoy

• Tagging Tools

• Structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to the public library catalogue

• When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing

23. More resources

• Google Image Labeler

• 43Things

• The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging

• Becoming a tagging kung-fu master

• Tips From Top Taggers

• Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off

• The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries

24. And just a few more

• Cataloging and You: Measuring the Efficacy of a Folksonomy for Subject Analysis

• And related blog post - An academic take on LibraryThing tags