The personal detour
I’m back from giving the closing talk at SOLINET’s annual membership meeting, where I was well-pampered by all involved. I also rented a Prius for the trip, and it was quite difficult to return this lovely car to Avis. I had wondered how I would like driving a Prius, and the answer is “OMG ponies!” Smooth ride, the joy of watching myself save fuel, and pride of (temporary) ownership of a green vehicle… ‘sall good.
I didn’t sleep well for two nights running (no fault to anyone except my over-active brain working on issues completely unrelated to SOLINET, speeches, or cars), so during my talk I felt under my game. I can always feel the difference between “they liked my talk” and “I shot them over the moon with numinous insights.” I’ll make a point of sleeping better before I teach “Writing for the Web” at TBLC next month.
The when-ness of tagging
Now I make a sharp right turn to discuss tagging in workflow context. Over on Thingology, Tim Spalding discusses user tagging of Godless, Ann Coulter’s latest screed book, pointing out that on Amazon the shouting match is unrelated to book ownership:
But while, on LibraryThing, where you have to have a book to tag it, Godless has a fairly unremarkable tag cloud, touching on its subject matter and point of view, on Amazon, the tagging has devolved into a shouting match.
For some time I’ve been pondering tagging in the context of a user’s workflow. Tagging in library catalogs hasn’t worked yet for a number of reasons, such as these rather obvious points:
- John Blyberg has noted that without critical mass, tagging is useless. I’d go farther and say without critical mass, tagging could backfire, because only the most determined cranks and pranksters might actually use it. A local library catalog is not beefy enough to build critical mass on its own; I don’t know how big or how heavily-used a catalog needs to be, but “a lot” is my guess. (Then there is the issue with the silo-like design of most library software, which keeps social data imprisoned behind proprietary walls.) That is yet another reason I like “LibraryThing for Libraries“: it’s an enrichment service to salt a catalog with an initial mass of high-quality tags built by passionate readers (and also provides that spookily-marvelous if-you-liked-this functionality).
- Some systems that claim to offer tagging make it so high-pain to tag that it works against adoption. I am thinking of the system where to merely SEE the tags a user must log in, and where tags are only searchable in “Advanced Search.” (Carl Grant, if you’re reading this, I owe you a citation on people-don’t-use-advanced-search… you have been very patient.)
- Also, on several occasions I have observed conversations about tagging between vendors and customers where the first words out of a customer’s mouth are “How can I control tagging?” and the vendor then responds in kind. If your primary objective is to “control” tagging, rather than make it work (that is, at minimum, to encourage users to provide quality tags), then the system design, to borrow youthful jargon, will be a FAIL.
But I have also pondered tagging in workflow context and feel this has not received adequate discussion. I’m guessing (based on Tim’s comments) that Librarything users are predominantly tagging when they add books or when they return to their collection for maintenance/grooming activities, such as cleaning up entries, fiddling with their default display, or examining the community discussion around books. Tim is also suggesting that on Amazon tagging appears to be less related to activities related to the workflow of book acquisition and ownership.
So I again mull over the library catalog and tagging workflow. Most catalogs are designed to help users find books or book-like items — known items, or items found through discovery. (Well, that is the claim, anyway.) You don’t return books through a library catalog (at least not yet). So when would tagging happen?
My guess is the best tagging would happen when the users returns the catalog to find more items. I say this because in some respects, a library catalog appears to be remarkably similar to Netflix in workflow, where I (again, out on this limb!) presume user reviewing (similar to tagging?) happens when a user logs in to refresh his or her queue with yummy new titles or simply get a reminder of what’s in the queue (in my family’s case, this happens after we receive some bizarre movie that sorta-looked-good that stealthily crept up to be #1 in one of our queues).
If I’m not going to tag when I find a book (why would I, if I haven’t read it, Amazon notwithstanding), and I’m not going to tag when I check out a book (an unrelated physical activity), and I’m not going to tag after I read a book (because that would mean the sole reason I’m returning to the catalog is to tag an item, which feels low-gain), and I’m not going to tag when I return a book (can you see me at the circ desk, reciting tags I want added to an item — or perhaps shouting tags into a book drop? Or I guess I could write them on a p-slip)…
Seems to me that tagging workflow in a catalog should be “gamed” so that the next time I visit the catalog to find something, the catalog entices me to tag. That would also be when I’m motivated to tag the book in a way that describes it well for my own bibliographic reuse, and also for others. (It could lead to opinion-tagging, though maybe that is always inevitable.)
Then again, what if at the beginning of a new discovery session the catalog recommended books? Prompted me to add reviews? Suggested I queue items? But I get ahead of myself…
All I’m really saying is that the very primitive tagging workflows I’ve seen so far in library catalogs aren’t designed to encourage tagging. (I am not referring at all to LibraryThing for Libraries, which at this point is a one-way enrichment service.) In fact, I don’t see much attention to tagging workflow, period. It feels very random and first-gen — a tacked-on service to allow a vendor to say “Yes, we offer tagging.” If you care at all about engaging users in catalogs and building user-contributed data, or for that matter leveraging social data period, that is simply not good enough.
Thoughts on tagging? Do I have this all wrong, or is there a nubbin of sensicalness here? Have I missed or misinterpreted/misrepresented some tagging behavior?
Posted on this day, other years:
- SEFLIN Board Talk - 2007
- Librarians who Write, Yet Again - 2004
- Upcoming Discussions - 2004
Thomas Vanderwall examined Amazon tagging practices last year, in a back and forth discussion with Tim Spalding. In addition to the comments on Tim’s original post, Tom addressed the matter in more depth in an posting to Personal Info Cloud.
You should also check out some of Margret Kipp’s work (going via her citeulike page gets a lot of other tagging research.
Thanks, Simon, I’ll follow up on this.
Simon… a follow-up… those links/posts/comments didn’t quite do it for me; not un-useful, some good points, just not what I was expecting.
“Then again, what if at the beginning of a new discovery session the catalog recommended books? Prompted me to add reviews? Suggested I queue items?”
Of course, this is exactly what Netflix already does with their movie ratings. When I log in, it displays the titles of several movies I’ve returned recently and asks me to rate them and/or review them. It also recommends some new movies and suggests I add them to my que. These recommendations used to be a joke – I’d order a John Wayne film and get a page of Westerns recommended – but lately they seem to include films that were rated highly by people who tend to like the same movies I do. If I want to see more information, it offers to show me reviews of this movie. The most awesome feature is that I can identify users who loved the same movies I love and view lists of the movies these people rated. Great system-works very well for me and has led me to some movies I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Jean, I agree with all your comments about Netflix, including the improvements to its recommendation engine. I initially found the recommendations annoying, and assumed it was due to the interface, but now I like them. Sometimes if I’m in a hurry to complete a specific task I ignore them, but but otherwise I like to see what people who watch what I watch recommend, and at the very least, I star my returns.
1) I think suggestions might be helpful in a public library, but it might be an annoyance to the academic student who took that one class on 5th century basket weaving, and now the catalog keeps suggesting basket weaving books. Would every research paper haunt you forever?
2)Would an undergrad anonymously tag an academic library catalog? My gut instinct is “no”. However, if tagging is made part of a profile where they can “show off” what they’re reading, then maybe. This is what Visual Bookshelf is trying to do in Facebook. Some grad students/faculty might find tagging fun. And of course, you always get the altruistic types who want to add value to the system (read: librarians).
3) I’m looking forward to the day when tags (and reviews, ratings, etc.) are interoperable. Then I can finally tag items in LibraryThing and know that my tags have been added to the global hive mind.
Thanks again (as always) for your insights! Great food for thought!
You could do something like Google Image Labeler does and make it a competition (but probably non-synchronous) between individuals or groups. You could offer to waive fines, reduce hold wait time, etc., as a reward for participation.
I think the vast majority of succesful tagging happens when users tag to aid their OWN workflow. Generally to keep track of things. You tag on delicious to keep track of your bookmarks. You tag on librarything to organize your collections. The most succesful tagging isn’t done to help _other_ people find things, but to keep track of things yourself–at least not at first, not to built the succesful tag ecology. If there are cases of succesful tagging community where people to tag to help others find things–I’d suggest it would be because it somehow benefits them personally to help people find things. Such as, maybe, tagging your blog posts on wordpress.com because you want others to find your blog posts.
A succesful tag ecology is generally built on tagging actions that serve very personal interests which do not need the succesful tagging ecology on top of it. Interests served even if you are the only one who is tagging. The succesful tagging ecology which builds out of it–and which goes on to provide collective benefit that was not the original intent of the taggers–is an epiphenomenon.
So what personal benefit can a user get in tagging in a library catalog? If we provided better ‘saved records’ features, perhaps, keep tracks of books you’ve checked out, books you might want to check out, etc. But I’m not sure if our users actually USE our catalogs enough to find this useful, no matter how good a ‘saved records’ feature we provide. In an academic setting, items from the catalog no longer neccesarily make up a majority of a user’s research space.
To me, that suggests, can we capture tags from somewhere else? My users export items to refworks. Does refworks allow tagging yet? If it did, is there a way to export (really re-import) these tags BACK to the catalog, when a user tags something? But even if so, it would be better if Refworks somehow magically aggregated tags from _different_ catalogs, of the same work. But that relies on identifier issues we haven’t solved yet. If our catalogs provide persistent URLs (which they don’t usually, which is a tragedy), users COULD tag in delicious if they wanted to. Is there a way to scan delicious for any tags including your catalogs url, and import those back in?
Worldcat provides a much larger share of the academic user’s research interface than my own catalog. And worldcat has solved the “aggregating different copies of this work from different libraries” problem to some extent. Which is why it would make so much sense for worldcat to offer a tagging service–which can be easily incorporated into your own local catalog for both assigning and displaying tags (if not for searching) ala library thing. It is astounding to me that OCLC hasn’t provided this yet. It seems to be a very ‘low hanging fruit’ that is worth a try.
[…] it here too (I’ve been flagging on the blogging lately). Karen Schneider thinks about “tagging in a workflow context“ Tagging in library catalogs hasn’t worked yet for a number of […]
Michael C. — that feels a bit like bribing people into tagging. If we want records to be enriched by user vocabulary — and come to think of it, we’ve talked about user goals but not about broader biblio-outcomes — my feeling is that both the incentives and the workflow positioning need to be related to the activity.
Jonathan, your comment is also your blog post, which is fine. 😉 (It’s not pron and it’s not ad hominem, so let it bloom!) But note that one reason I tag on delicious is that it’s easy to tag. There are times when it’s not easy enough — when I’m hurrying — and then I count on the abstract working for me (since it’s so easy to add an abstract). Part of my tagging behavior is about findability, but part of it has to do with being able to do something well in the first place.
As I commented on your blog, WorldCat’s social tools are at best perfunctory when they exist at all. Look at the review function.
Cliff, thanks for commenting! Re: “it might be an annoyance to the academic student who took that one class on 5th century basket weaving, and now the catalog keeps suggesting basket weaving books.”
I think that’s what Jean and I were talking about — good recommendation behavior. In other words, recommendations have to *work.* A good recommendation system knows this. Jean’s point is that Netflix was annoying when its system didn’t work, and that it’s pleasurable now that it works well.
Warning…. long comment.
I have thought a lot about tagging. Both in our industry, and in my past one — legal marketing — where lawyers do tons of “workflow tagging,” except they call it “billing and timekeeping.”
Part of the problem with how tagging is considered for things like books is that we tend to think of it as a synonym for “bookmarking” in the Web browser sense of the word because of a Web-centric view of services like del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks.
When I go back and review my experience with legal billing, the good software products allow you to set up a system with workflow at the center of the activity; you define variables such as current clients, matters, co-workers, expense buckets, etc., with the goal of “tagging” each 1/10th of an hour as belonging to a specific set of cases, sub-cases, industries, clients, type of law being practiced, etc. In the case of this kind of billing, the point is entirely (for almost all firms) to produce a coherent “backwards view” of lawyer activity, such that billing can occur, and lawyers’ time assessed. Some few firms mine this extraordinary pile of data for CRM and matter analysis, but it’s rare.
This software ends up being able to generate all kinds of reports based on the variables that go in. And if you shift your brain about 10-degrees, you can think of the variable content as “tags,” and work backwards to ways in which you could use standard Web-type tagging to visualize the data; a tag cloud of clients in the 90-day past due bucket, for example, might be fun…
This is a type of tagging I’d call “verb” or “activity” tagging. It’s very useful, because you only tag stuff based on what you did with it, not what you thought of it, which would be “adjective” or “descriptive” tagging. Verbs are, of course, much more useful than adjectives.
In the realm of book or material tagging we’re talking about, we do see some tags like “to read” or “have read” or “I own” or “I want,” which are all verb tags; they qualify an item based on an activity; purchase, reading, coveting, etc. In the discussions I’ve seen in libraryland, these tags are commonly regarded as, at best, confusing to the overall process and, at worst, to be discarded in the public view of tags. This is because there is no back-data on the user related to overall preferences, “life-flow” or self information.
Go back to the lawyer billing application for a second… once an attorney has self-identified as a biller on a project, any hour that gets tagged to that account and lawyer is then cross-referenceable (?) to other attorney data; billing rate, practice group, upcoming vacation time, etc.
In a library setting, an initial set of queries about how a user will be utilizing tags could provide a set of data that can then be cross referenced back for his/her own use, and that of others. In my head, I call this “self tagging.” It does hinge on either, A) a user being ok with the system tracking personal usage information, or; B) an anonymizing system, or; C) both
So, for example, when I start using the system as a student, I could enter data about my major, my school, my intended career choice, current classes, professors, etc. Then, when I get to a book/resource in the system and choose the tagging option, I can tag it with what class it’s being used for from an easy drop-down.
This is useful from a workflow standpoint (what books do I need for Chem 207?) and from a discovery standpoint (what books are being used for chemistry courses at MIT?). Combine this one piece of data with a quick rating option (1-5 stars, whatever), and you’ve got a way to rank the use of text-books by number of tags and popularity. You could also compare this info for students vs. professors vs. authors vs. librarians. Wouldn’t that be fun information to have as I plan my next course?
The use of tags for ontological discovery is great, and services like LibraryThing do a good job of aggregating them. It is cool to be able to see a list of items that people I know, and whose opinion I trust, have tagged “steampunk” etc. It’s helpful when trying to find items based on “adjective” descriptions.
Workflow or “verb” tags, however, can (I think) provide a much better view of what’s actually happening with a resource. And activity monitoring is always a great teacher. So, in the example you give, the recommendations might come based less on the number of people who have tagged a work “basket weaving,” than the number of people who have tagged a work “purchased” for a “basket weaving course” with a 4 or 5 star rating.
For non-academic use, you could have a user profile with sub-domains based on use. For example, most of the books I purchase/read would fall into 10-or-less categories. So, if I self-tag my job as “marketing” and tag my industries of interest as “libraries” and “not-for-profit,” then when I mark a book as “purchased” and “work related,” it would automatically be tagged for my job/industry. If I then add one ontological tag — let’s say, “Web design” — you end up having a much richer data set every time I add something to my “purchased” set. Other folks could look for “design” books tagged to (rather than tagged “as”) marketing people, library people, not profit people, etc.
Not sure on the technical side how you’d implement something like that… I’m not a code guy. But as a user, a teacher and a data-hungry marketing guy… the idea of being able to see which resources get “hit” in various contexts would be fascinating to me.
Karen, it was a joy having you for SAMM this year. Email me your presentation if you’d like it to be made available on the conference website. Thanks again!!
Some people have suggested auto-tagging by search term — that might work if there was a bit of give and take, some kind of friendly floating question about whether this document should be tagged with that word.
I will try to dig up some evidence for you on “people-don’t-use-advanced-search” because they really truly don’t use it.
Avi, I like how delicious prompts with tags. The idea of suggesting tags from search terms is interesting. I still have extensive notes from IA Summit about “better tagging.”
Would love that evidence… I am aware of it myself from testing at LII (when people *do* use advanced search, they get it wrong, too).
Laura, I’ll fish the presentation off my laptop and upload it to slideshare.net — I keep meaning to do a follow-up post!
[…] Library Thing for Libraries for some time but, Karen Schneider over at Free Range Librarian has an interesting post on why tagging in catalogs might simply fail at best or backfire at worst unless it’s given […]
I just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed this post and the comments.
It’s really helpful for me to think more deeply about tagging than I usually do. I do tag in del.icio.us and in LibraryThing (though I will confess that I am so trained to think in controlled vocabularies that I actually look up the LCSH for my books on LibraryThing and use those as tags, along with the Dewey class number…).
But I mostly don’t see the big benefit. I tag in LibraryThing so that I can find titles quickly. Still, my major use of LibraryThing is “what books did I move when I moved to NYC”.
So, I’ve nothing useful to add, but just wanted to say I found the post and the comments interesting, thought-provoking, and helpful.