Tag Sale

I have a fairly passionate love/hate relationships with tags and tagging.

The love part: I completely adore the ability to describe something in a multifaceted way, and to retrieve it through very different paths. In fact, in my own small way, I like to think I was a little ahead of the curve on this concept. For quite some time now, I have had a program called PDA Cookbook on my Palm. I enter recipes that we have especially enjoyed, which is a big help when I'm wrestling with the What's-for-dinner dilemma. PDA Cookbook allows you to assign multiple categories (tags) to your recipes. So unlike a more traditional recipe file, where you are forced to put your food-splattered recipies in only one folder or section, you can assign tags, such as beef, entrees, slow-cooker,or winter.

This is cool and useful, because sometimes I menu-plan with different criteria in mind. Crazy-busy night coming up? I can search on Quick or Slow-cooker and find something that works. Everyone's sick of chicken? I can search on Meatless or Fish to offer some variety. Some of my more creative tags: Good for company, Freezes well, Make again, Old standbys, and (my favorite) Sides for iffy entrees. [This is used for side dishes that my kids will reliably eat, when I'm planning to cook something that I think they won't go for. It prevents starvation and keeps me from being a short-order cook]. I also put seasonal tags on recipes, since I don't typically feel like pot roast in August or grilled chicken in February.

With my paper recipes, it was always a judgment call whether to file something by main ingredient, type of dish (soup, casserole, etc), or some other criteria. Tags are an elegant solution to the dilemma.

The other thing I love about tags is that they tend to circumvent the sometimes obtuse library-ese of subject headings. To stick with the food example, a cookbook could be tagged with cookbook, cooking, recipes, cook, food, vegetarian cooking, yummies, gastronomy, gourmet, Food Network, Paula Deen, eating, or even (gasp!) cookery. So depending on how you personally conceptualize cookbooks, you can retrieve them without having to know that a committee of librarians decreed decades ago that Cookbooks Shall be Assigned the Subject Heading of Cookery.

The flip side of all of this fabulous retrieval is the lack of authority control which absolutely does give me the heebie-jeebies. So if we got wild and crazy and opened up the catalog to the masses, we would likely get some records tagged well and thoughtfully, and others tagged by people who can't spell their way out of a paper bag. And of course you would only retrieve items that were tagged according to your own conceptualization of the topic, thereby missing items that had only one tag, or other tags that were not part of your mindset. If you're a gastronomy person, you won't hit the record tagged yummies. Though if you're a gastronomy person, you may well not be interested the same books as a yummies person.

But of course, as it stands with controlled vocabulary, you are rather out of luck if you don't conceptualize cookbooks as cookery, so there you go. At least tags give you some other options, I guess.

I also find that I get a lot of noise in my search results when I search something by a tag. This offends my librarian sensibilities. Also, without a thesaurus, I find that I don't always think of things in the same way. While I was retro-tagging my posts, I called some of them photo sharing and some of them image sharing. Not intentionally, I just forgot which term I had used previously. This was before I discovered that Blogger pops up a list of labels you have already used when you're tagging.

Something I noticed about the library catalogs that have patron-added tags is that they skew toward certain types of books. Some of the top ten tags in the Ann Arbor District Library's catalog are fantasy, manga, anime, shonen, and shonen jump. So the depth of the "cataloging" must vary widely. People who are into tagging will tag the books they read or are interested in, while readers of other books or genres may have no interest in tagging, so those books are orphaned in the tagging department.

So what could libraries do? Reconceptualize subject cataloging, maybe? We aren't constrained by how many access points we can fit on a catalog card anymore, so why not apply the concept of tagging to the cataloging process? One of the things that drove me nuts about cataloging class was the necessity of deciding on one or a very few things that a book was supposedly "about." If catalogers tagged, think of the awesome access we could provide. Hey, we could even help patrons find that book they remember that was red! Patrons could submit tags, and librarians could put those tags through a disambiguation process (job security, you know). In this fantasy world, all books would have at least a baseline level of tagging. We could capture the spirit of massive amounts of participation, while perhaps minimizing some of the drawbacks of it.

Yeah, and we all have the staff and the budget for this. Retrospectively, even.

I'll be back later with thoughts on del.ico.us and wikis...I am determined to finish by December 10!