tagging

I dipped into Delicious (www.delicious.com)  and also Library Thing (www.librarything.com) .  But much more strongly this discussion reminded me of using tags [1] to create an excel database (or catalogue) of "grey literature" that my husband had collected on hydrology and I on silviculture that we wanted our staff to be able to access.  I had sorted my  grey literatue (http://www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/odlis_g.aspx#grayliterature) into file folders by self-selected subject headings and on the whole I could find an article later that I remembered or an article that was related to a current project.  Sometimes I may have to go through 2 to 4 file folders (subject headings) but often that found other related articles.  My husband had sorted his articles by author, because he had created his original collection to complete his masters.  To find articles in his collection which didn't have subject headings was difficult since only he was really familar with the authors. Many of the researchers had done several articles on their research topic so they would be adjacent articles could be relevant; and you could identify other relevant authors by reading the research paper bibliography list but this would be much more time consuming. Which is important to consider when professional time is what your business is selling. 

So when I created the Excel database (now I would call this our catalogue) creating and using subject headings was important so our staff could use the database to find relevant articles quickly.  I found this task easier by repeating the same subject heading "tags".  So I quickly created a list so I could repeat the tags, just like the controlled consistent vocabulary noted in Lesson 8 of our LIBE465 course notes. 



1. Noruzi, A. (2006). Folksonomies: (Un)Controlled Vocabulary? Knowledge Organization, 33(4), 199-203. Retrieved Oct 2012 from http://eprints.rclis.org/11286/1/Folksonomy%2C_UnControled_Vocabulary.pdf