“God bless Bryony - she puts up with a lot! Last night she had to put up with me adding a tagging system to our test HIP server (wwwlibrarycat.hud.ac.uk).
To be honest, the amount of interest in the subject keyword cloud took me by surprise, and it was fascinating to read all of the other blogs that picked it up. A number of blogs made the very valid point that it wasn't a true tag cloud - the tags were created using the existing subject keywords and not from tags added by our users.
I began to feel that tag clouds in OPACs are a true ‘chicken & egg’ scenario — to be able to add that kind of functionality to our live OPAC, I need to be able to prove that it's a valid and worthwhile new feature… but to do that, I need to have already implemented it and to have had a healthy number of tags added by our users. I think this is backed up by the sheer number of people out there who think it's a "good idea" but who are not in a position to start the ball rolling. Obviously, it'd be a different story if our OPACs already had tag functionality ‘out of the box’!…
I've still got more work to do with our initial attempt at OPAC tagging — at the moment, all you can do is add tags. In particular, I don't have a method of selecting a tag and then showing all the items that have been tagged… but I'm hoping that Casey Durfee (Seattle Public Library) will come to my rescue. Spookily, I woke up this morning wondering how on earth I could hack our HIP server to allow this and then found that Casey had already emailed me to let me know it was possible!…
I guess I've tagged about 150 books so far (mostly those to do with XML and HTML), but what I'd really like to do is throw open the doors and invite anyone who reads this weblog post to jump in and start tagging our catalogue.” [Davey P’s Weblog]
Be sure to read the whole post and then help him out by having some fun tagging a catalog! Thanks, Dave &ndas
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
