RCPL Tech Challenge 6

I have to say that the tag cloud is what drew me in to Flickr so quickly on the 4th challlenge. It was so neat to be able to type in a keyword for a knitting pattern (for example, a search for "Shetland Triangle") brings up a bunch of pictures of that pattern - a pattern I'm currently working on. I hadn't looked at Flickr's tag cloud, so I had to go do that -Japan is still popular - and so is Wedding. Not a surprise. When I clicked on Japan, the first thing I saw was a picture of Minnie Mouse! I also tried more knitting searches for "Misty Garden" and "Kate the Kitten" both patterns I've knitted, and the searches did bring up knitting.

This challenge was fun because I've always wanted to explore LibraryThing, but just hadn't had a chance to do so. I'd love to open an account and tag all the books in my library -but don't see how I'd ever have the time. I've had an ipod for almost a year and still haven't finished adding all my CD's to it, so I can't see ever having my library on LibraryThing. However, I must say that I didn't know that I could enter books by searching - I thought I'd have to enter all the information for each book. I added two books to my library, Pawn of Prophecy an old fantasy novel that I've read thousands of times, and A Little Princess , a children's book that's one of my all-time favorites. LibraryThing doesn't seem as intuitive to use as Flickr does -I had to search around to figure out how to find the tag cloud. But, then I had a lot of fun searching for different titles and clicking on different tags.

I think tagging is definitely a valuable tool for web users, even though there's the issue of authority control. Tagging is a good way to find related items (be they pictures, books, blog posts, whatever) and learn about new things. I think the Book Suggester at LibraryThing is a great tool for Readers Advisory - kind of a "if you like X, you might like Y" type of tool. I already use tagging in my personal life - all my blog entries are tagged, and all the items in my Flickr account are tagged as well (by the name of the pattern, and as knitting). As far as tagging in general, and it's relevance to RCPL, well, tagging is really no different than assigning subject headings to an item, which is part of what we do already - it's just a different format.