Tagging

Tagging is a concept I'm pretty familiar with. I have used it in photobucket to differentiate between family photos, different vacations and events, and photos I used for my myspace page, for profile pictures, and for various web 2.0 projects like lolcats. I've also used it in Librarything as a substitute for subject headings. I have created a small school library using librarything and the tags help people search by subject.

I know that tagging probably makes catalogers retch and want to run for the hills. However, I think google has pretty much changed the way people look at subject searches. Folks don't really want to take the effort to learn controlled vocabulary anymore; they want to put in a search term that comes to them naturally that leads to their desired result. To some degree, I understand that. I can understand why a lay person would want to be able to find information on the Civil War by typing in The Civil War rather than having to say United States - History - Civil War - 1861 - 1865. The latter is more technically precise, but less accessible. One of the things the Web has done is turn everybody into an online researcher; a skill once reserved for academics is now universal. Tagging allows subject search with more universal language. Since we are dealing with instant electronic searches through cyberspace rather than time-intensive manual searches through card catalogs, this can be effective.