Tagging in library catalogs

Tagging can be very useful in library catalogs. Giving the public the ability to tag books and other materials in a library’s catalog provides an alternative form of organization of those materials in addition to the formal classification system set forth by the library (ie., call number). This ties into the idea of giving users the means to rate items, tag them and write reviews, which are described as forms of crowdsourcing by Aaron Tay in his blog Musings About Librarianship. Tay writes that tagging is most successful when there is a critical mass of users, such as the Library Of Congress’ collection of historical photos on Flickr. But when free tagging doesn’t get the large number of tags necessary to make the system useful, Tay describes this a failure. Tagging relies on large quantities of tags so that one can view similar items that have been tagged.

One could also point to the lack of controlled vocabulary in the tagging system, where users can tag an item with any word or phrase regardless of how others are tagging their items. This is another downside to tagging in library catalogs, where a search on the tag “sciencefiction” will not retrieve the results for items tagged “science_fiction”. Nevertheless, tagging in library catalogs seems to be in its early stages and there is certainly time for this idea to develop and improve as users catch on its features.