The best way to tag for what purpose? OMG, the librarian doesn’t know the best way to tag!

Some possible purposes include:

- so that I can find stuff
- so that I can share stuff
- so that I can describe stuff
- so that I can group stuff together
- so that I can make kewl tag clowds

Primarily, I tag so that I can find my own stuff.

On del.icio.us, I try to think of the words that I will use to recall the object. These become tags. I generally leave out tags that are obvious to me, like “library”.

So the tag is less “what is this about” than “how will I remember this?” I think this is the way most of us use del.icio.us - the value is in the recall, not the description, though there is certainly overlap. After tagging, I often look to see what terms other people have assigned, and sometimes see people do it the other way around. Whatever works! That’s what’s so great about free tagging.

It makes less sense if I am tagging for someone else, like to organize a bunch of documents on a website, or, um, library books in a library. In these cases, you want to pick consistent terms that other people are familiar with.

You can also tag for sharing on a small scale. After another virtual reference practitioner told me he was using the tag ‘virtualreference’ where I was using ‘vr’, I switched my tags over to his system. Now we were sharing with each other and contributing to the same set of documents. It doesn’t stop other practitioners from using ‘vr’ or ‘virtual_reference’ or ‘digref’, but we at least have a community of two.

I also use tags when I am working on a project. I use a series of tags (not public because the documents aren’t public) to assess quality in virtual reference transcripts, and whether I have followed up on them or not.

And I love/hate tag clouds. They look cool but it is a lot of work to get rich information from them.

So the answer to your question is really going to depend on the context. Students may very likely tag to group things together for a project, and to share with each other, and to find the things they’ve looked at before. It is less likely they’ll be creating taxonomies.

This all reminds me of Dan Chudnov’s professional mission, to “Help people build their own libraries”.

As an afterthought, I also pay attention to how my tagging software works. In the case of del.icio.us, I know that I can recall objects by more than one term at a time, so I don’t bother trying to compound names and phrases into a single tag. Instead of deciding between BruceWayne, Bruce_Wayne, bruce.wayne and ‘wayne,bruce’ and then having to remember which one I chose, I just use both bruce and wayne. Then on delicious, I can search by tag/bruce+wayne. I have the slight problem of also getting objects about Wayne Bruce this way, but I like the idea that I can use the ‘bruce’ tag for tag/bruce+banner, his own taggy identity problems notwithstanding.