Tagging: You're It

While I've noticed tag clouds before, I've never really used them or even paid much attention. Chirag's inaugural address timeline tag cloud of inaugural speeches were really cool. (His cats, Giga and Tera, were pretty darn cute, too). I'm not a big bookmarker, but I can see the great advantage to a delicious account over bookmarking since I regularly use at least 5 different PCs. Our reference homepage, with its subject heading grouped links, serves a similar purpose for reference related activities, but it's pretty static and we can't add links to it by ourselves. Of course that does prevent an overload of links that might really mushroom if someone is aggressive at adding things to a collaborative account. The primary advantage that I see with tagging vs. LC subject headings is in currentness. Seems like the collective public arrives pretty quickly at terminology to describe a new phenomenon, activity, etc. LC moves ponderous along and eventually comes up with something close--or sticks to something only remotely accurate that they globbed on to early in the history of something. The situation in library catalogs improved significantly with the advent of keyword title searching, but we shouldn't have to keyword title search in order to find an appropriate book to check subject heading wording for additional titles--which are often assigned some equally obscure but different subject. However some of the patron assigned tags appear to mimic library subject headings (like fantasy or science fiction) so provide little advantage.
Delicious: While it's interesting to search for what other people have bookmarked on a topic--and to see how many people (and who) have tagged it through delicious--and to see that else they have tagged, the social aspect of it is a little scary too, having people able to see what you've bookmarked personally--though I realize they'd have to guess your identity if you don't use your real name. Of course with so many people sharing common names, someone else might to tagging, blogging, posting, whatever under your name.

I'M IMING

Since I've been using GoogleTalk, this week's assignment wasn't entirely new, but still there was a lot to be learned. I found the chat about Meebos in the catalog fascinating. Our catalog is so NOT user friendly that I think having a widget handy there would be a huge service to our patrons. I especially like Paul Pival's comment that there should be one on the results page as well as the error page, since I've found people often build a search that nets them tons of inappropriate hits and they have no idea how to narrow it down to what they really want. We'd need to enable some sort of audio indication that we've rec'd a message though since we're often doing something other than using our computers when we're at the desk. I looked at the IM pages of several of the libraries on the list and contact LaX public with a question about their Oktoberfest and got an almost instantaneous answer. Prosit!