Thing 13 -- Tagging

What an interesting concept! I love the idea of "folksonomies." In our library courses, we studied metadata, discussed hierarchies and thesauri, and created our own metadata schemes of organization with broader terms, narrower terms, and related terms. This type of metadata, however, is organized chaos, which may bother some librarians who are organized to the point of rigidity (unlike myself-the most disorganized librarian I know). The users get to pick the terms that describe the information object, and they can use any term that makes sense to them rather than being forced to choose from a list.

I have used tagging with social networking, blogging, Flickr, and Shelfari (which, by the way, you have GOT to check out). Our library's automation system, Follett's Destiny, now has an option for user tagging. I think it's a good idea for people who are used to tagging. Sometimes users have a better way of classifying something, or at least a more common sense way, rather than trying to force a concept or idea into a predefined set of terms. At the elementary school level, I'm not sure that it will be utilized much, but I can definitely see it as a plus at the middle school/high school level, especially when kids are already so well versed in the web 2.0 world.