I wasn’t far off – I managed to get the basics working on our test OPAC in about 3 hours, although there’s still more work to do in terms of integrating it properly.

wwwlibrarycat.hud.ac.uk/bib.html?379627

I was keen to see if the tags would dovetail with the existing subject headings, and there does seem to be a good correlation going on.

Even though less than 300 items have been tagged, there are some useful tag clouds being produced – e.g. apache.

In the new year, I’ll try and argue the case for having tags on the live OPAC. In the meantime, John at Ann Arbor is busy working on adding tagging to their OPAC.

regards
Dave

Having worked with both public and academic UK libraries, I suspect a public library would be in a better position to run with this very worthwhile experiment.

Ever since I started working with libraries (back in 1996) I’ve always felt that “audience participation” is the key to getting people to really engage with the OPAC, and it depresses me to see how many of our students will simply walk away from our catalogue PCs if they don’t find what they want via a general keyword search. We need things that make our OPACs more “sticky”!

Well – a couple of hours with some good strong coffee for a decent working prototype, if nothing else! Maybe one of these days I will

Have fun!

*boggle*

I’m lucky I understand anything about ours, as convoluted as it is.

That said…I still think it’s an experiment that needs to be done. I’ve blogged a couple of times about the potentially interesting things we can find out when we start tagging objects in the real world. Love to see it happen, even if I’m not technically competent enough to make it go.

I’d love to implement Jessamyn’s suggestion, but I doubt the more “senior” librarians here would allow it. My guess is that it would only take me a couple of hours to add that functionality to our PAC, but (at the moment) it would be too much of a radical step for some (perhaps many) of the staff to accept.