Categories
Library Issues Technology

Using TagTeam

When starting the design work on the Blockchain & Decentralization course, I knew that I would have many many more resources that students might find useful than I could possibly assign to them. I wanted to find a way to make those resources easily findable by the students that wanted to dive deeper on any particular piece of the admittedly very complex subject.

Enter TagTeam.

A tool designed originally for the Harvard Open Access Project, and written and supported by a superb group of developers, TagTeam is a librarian’s dream of a web resource collection tool. It allows for, as the documentation so pithily says “folksonomy in, ontology out.” With the ability to add a website to the Hub, allow folksonomy-style tagging when adding…but then, on the backend of the tool, to turn those arbitrary tags into a controlled vocabulary. You can even set up automatic replacements for unwanted tags.

One of my favorite built-in functions is the ability to craft URLs that will drill down to any level of the set of resources you might want: tagger, tag, both, set of tags, in any combination. You can subscribe to RSS feeds that will automatically feed your Hub, and TagTeam also provides the ability to extract resources via RSS or JSON, and to remix feeds while doing so.

There are a few things I’d love to see added to TagTeam. The biggest would be that it would be fantastic to be able to integrate the tagging of a resource with the ability to cache it in some way. The ability to combine TagTeam with a tool like Amber or ArchiveBox would be a fantastic way to ensure the continued availability of webpages, especially for educational use. It would also make TagTeam an amazing curricular tool for Academic Libraries to offer for their campuses (hint, hint).

Overall, I’ve been thrilled with using TagTeam in my course, and can see so many uses for academic libraries to provide an instance for their campuses. If you haven’t seen TagTeam, explore some of the public hubs, and see if it fits in your (or your library’s) toolchain. And if you want to see what sort of resource can be put together using it, take a look at the Hub for the Blockchain course.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *