[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature inquiry

[Dan Scott]

2008/10/6 Stuart Miller <stuartwm at uchicago.edu>:
> Deanna,
>
> I certainly don't object to making tagging optional, but I think it really is something that every library should offer.
>
> I agree that tagging can be quite messy and inevitably leads to situations such as you describe. But after all, you DID find the product with just the one term, so does it matter that others added many variants?
>
> I agree that using controlled vocabulary schemes can sometimes be more efficient, but I think we see tagging as a boon for any group with a shared interest, especially when LCSH doesn't really cut it.
>
> And students appear to ENJOY this capability--and probably assign tags that are more easily recognizable among their peers than some of the rather bizarre and sometimes woefully outdated LC headings. And, judging from the subject cataloging I've seen in our large database, I'm not sure that librarians can lay any special claim to consistency or scientific rigor when assigning subject headings. I think any group--academically inclined or otherwise--has its own informal lingo that is well served by tagging.
>
> Sorry, not really directly relevant to Evergreen development!

Well... it actually is directly relevant to Evergreen, because it
affects the priority with which a given feature should be pursued and
developed.

Your assertions about student behaviour conflict with the findings
presented at Access 2008 just last week by both Ken Varnum (who
presented on MTagger results at University of Michigan) and Steve Toub
(who presented research results on social behaviour at Queen's
University in conjunction with the work Bibliocommons is doing). Both
presentations showed the results of research that tagging in an
academic library context is something that appears to be valued by
librarians, but not particularly (or at all) by library users.

Ken's presentation showed that if you build it, they may not come -
MTagger has a very slick interface but after a year in operation less
than 2000 tags in total had been assigned by anyone - and most of
those tags were assigned by librarians, not students or faculty.

Steve's presentation showed that students didn't get "tagging" in a
library catalog, even though they recognized the feature in Facebook.
Completely different contexts.

Apologies to the speakers for horribly simplifying the presentations
(hopefully they will be made available somewhere), but my take-away
was that implementing tagging in the Evergreen catalog interface
should be a low priority. Given that every URL in the default catalog
is bookmarkable and sharable, there are any number of cite-u-like /
delicious / unalog web applications or the Zotero Firefox plug-in that
can be used to tag pages in the default catalog. Aggregated tag
applications that can be used to tag the whole Web (including library
catalogs), rather than an application that can only tag the contents
of a single catalog, make a lot more sense to me.

Of course, all that notwithstanding, someone could build a connector
from VuFind to Evergreen and use VuFind as the discovery interface for
Evergreen and inherit all of VuFind's social features. Or someone
could put in the time to develop tagging natively in Evergreen and
send in a patch.

But, based on the evidence I saw last week, adding tagging to
Evergreen is not a priority for me (as I try to plug away at the last
bits of internationalization work that are required for 1.4).

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University