Eric, I think it would be useful, in some places. Flickr only allows the person submitting the photo to add tags. Much like an author submitting something to D-Space could add keywords. Those terms, from an uncontrolled source, can be useful in searching. Our catalogs allow for this in field 653.
Del.icio.us allows anyone to tag anything. This works best with a large collection of tags. Then clustering tools can group and distinguish terms. A few scattered terms would not be much use, in general. Unless, you had a small group who wanted to tag things for their own personal information management uses. Dbtoread, might not be useful to anyone but me, but it could be very useful to me. If there are folks who want to or would use tagging for their own personal uses and they are important users it could make sense. Freetag is an open-source tool to use with MySQL databases to add tagging. There was some talk of using this to add tags to Koha. Not sure if it was ever done. Sincerely, David Bigwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lunar & Planetary Institute http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/whats_new.shtml -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 1:29 PM To: CODE4LIB@listserv.nd.edu Subject: [CODE4LIB] tagging Over the weekend I had the opportunity to chat with a friend about "tagging" -- a sort of self- keyword cataloging as implemented by del.icio.us and flikr. I'm wondering, to what degree does this group here think tagging would be beneficial in Library Land? For example, we could allow tagging to be done against items in a library catalog or against a personalized collection of Internet resources. If it were beneficial, then how would y'all implement it? -- Eric Lease Morgan University Libraries of Notre Dame