Tagging up the Pollak Library

Hmmmm, let me start out with my delicious link: http://delicious.com/stschabrun

Tagging is something that is so very obvious as useful in delicious. I mean, there you have your own little bookmarking kingdom where you can call an apple "banana" if you want to. Of course, if you call an apple "banana" you will annoy anyone who is searching for bananas and doesn't want apples, but who cares. Your tags are mainly to help you organize your stuff, and the ability for others to make use of your tags is just a happy side effect. The trick is to get so many people tagging in your system (like delicious does) that quirkiness is rendered statistically unimportant. I think tagging gets to be more of an issue when there is not enough people tagging.

That gets to another issue. Unless someone plans to come back multiple times to a place where they have tagged, why would anyone bother to tag stuff? Where's the motivation. One reason seems to have something to do with self-identity and the urge to express oneself through one's interests. But in an academic setting, students are not usually identifying themselves through their information searching, which is usually externally not internally determined, e.g. professors set the task and often the subject of research. One exception is tagging resources with specific course numbers, which I can definitely see them doing. They may also want to tag to get around the fact that some subject headings are just plain useless. Faculty (& grad students) are different from undergrads insofar as they have long-term research interests, and I could see them tagging up WorldCat or other big databases with all kinds of esoteric tags. But again, there has to be a critical mass of taggers, I think, or the utility to the user community is going to be less than it could be.