These new technologies provide a new and interesting way of making connections between people and between ideas and between people and ideas!
Del.icio.us is great the way it is used for the library website. It's instananeousness(?) Ability for many people to add to the general content of the site. There is also the ability for staff to create groupings of links that they think will be of use/interest to the public, but which don't have a high priority for our web guru! Thus taking the pressure off.
Having looked at Ann Arbor's use of bookmarking for their catalogue, I'm ambivalent about customer tagging. I can see that there is the potential for some excellent links to be created between items you wouldn't instantly think of. Take the tag 'Environmentalism', I know you are thinking you'll be lead to heavy tomes on saving water, salinity, climate change and the like. Wrong!! Try Simpson's movie, The Lorax and The Omnivore's dilemma. There was another on living in a post carbon world, but these first few were a refreshing surprise, totally correct in their labelling but not what I would have thought of myself. An excellent use of the technology to value add.
However....there are also plenty of customer tags for many things which would bring up bigger and better hit lists, had the customer used the boring old catalog search. The Bob Dylan tag provided 26 hits. The catalog, keyword search, however brought up 111 items. There is a danger here of people duplicating what is already possible with the catalog search, instead of using tagging to create something new and illuminating. Not really a problem as long as people remember to search via both options.
The other reservation with this usage is skewing of library content. Ann Arbor obviously has a few GenYer's who are very Web2.0 savy and are using the library's del.icio.us account to create their own personal catalogue. Music, graphic novels, anime and fantasy themes dominate the tags in the Cloud. These are all, if you like recreational topics. I think it is more likely that taggers will tag when exhibiting recreational behaviour, rather than when studying, so the more academic topics will be left behind.
It's concievable that library funder's will see tags as a way of tailoring collections to the subjects that 'library users' are using most frequently. This would have implications for all those who are not Web2.0 savy, or who do not have the time to waste adding content to the net generally. Or know nothing about the Net at all, and really don't care! Just give them library shelves to browse, they'll make their choices on their own.
Oh my Goodness, haven't I raved here. That's enough. Tags are good, tags could be bad.
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I noted with interest your perceptive comments about tagging in the Ann Arbor District Library's catalogue as John Blyberg, the creator of SOPAC (the software that adds the tagging functionality to thier catalogue), expressed essentially the same sentiment. He said, "I’ll even turn the tables on myself and admit that I was wrong about local tagging in the OPAC. SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure. The whole post is interesting as it talks about the relationship between libraries and web 2.0 tools. I think I'll write an entire blog post about this!
Sorry, here's the link to John Blyberg's post, Library 2.0 Debased.
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