In the “Noticed by Muggles” Department, The Institute for the Future of the Book notes (approvingly, I assume) that the University of Pennsylvania library catalog is offering user tagging. My murky brain wonders if other libraries are doing this…
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PennTags is certainly an interesting experiment and I’ve never come across another library doing anything like it. I’ll just point out that PennTags is not just for the library catalog, and as far as I can tell a Penn Library OPAC keyword search does not search PennTags. In PennTags, catalog records can be tagged by anyone in the community, along with online videos, websites, journal article links, etc, but I think PennTags is an entirely separate thing from the the OPAC itself. I’m sceptical that this system on this scale is much use to the library patron in the library looking for a library item, though it might allow for some amount of serindipitious discovery (what a great phrase- I believe it’s Roy Tennant’s) of library resources. Maybe that’s the point: library-record-tagging’s real usefulness may be in introducing potential patrons not inclined to go to a library to the resources of their library. But perhaps on a global scale a PennTags-style system could have a real impact for the average library patron…imagine if del.icio.us users could tag catalog records and if OPAC searches included results from those del.icio.us tags. I’m guessing a workable OPAC tagging system will be a del.icio.us-amazon-OPAC mashup of some sort–something that will at the same time bring in new patrons and better serve existing ones.
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