Screencast: What's the big deal about tagging?
I just finished presenting to the annual meeting of the Association of Christian Librarians, in Quincy, MA. I enjoyed the talk more than usual, and thought I'd post a screencast of part of it, twenty minutes on tagging. It's not perfect, but it hits the points I wanted to hit, and who needs perfect anyway?The talk was somewhat anomalous insofar as I have been known to make librarians squirm with some of my examples—"leather erotica" is not generally spoken of during most library talks. So I was particularly nervous how this would go over at the CLA. All-in-all it went over just fine.
Here are the high-quality versions:
High quality (part 1/2)
High quality (part 2/2)
I've posted low-quality versions on YouTube:
Low-quality (part 1/2)
Low-quality (part 2/2)
Labels: library science, LIS, screencasts, tagging
posted by Tim at 2:47 PM
7 Comments:
Great job today, Tim. It was great getting to hear you in person at the ACL meeting! I think you had by far the best presentation at the conference!
Well, for what it's worth I found LibraryThing vastly superior to NoveList or WorldCat or any other major database/catalog of fiction when I was searching for YA books with spiritual themes - everyone else gave me "Christian Fiction" according to the publisher, I wanted to find books that dealt with the situations and ideas realistically and LibraryThing was awesome for that, especially with the tagmash searches. I've got a few of the results here in a fledgling collection.
I'm curious: what's your "quick Dewey tangent" that you cut off at the end?
Thank you for sharing your talk, it was informative and interesting! I hope to explore LibraryThing more this summer to see how I might use it more in my elementary media center or just personally.
I too wanted to hear more about the Dewey comment you made at the end of the Screencast. I am understand and appreciating tags more, but I wonder how it will all fit into what is already established. One thought that I had was how Dewey numbers provide an actual spot for real books that kids in my school want to put their hands on. The Dewey decimal system is unwieldy to teach and not always easy for students to learn, but it's what we have. Is there another path to take? Thanks again for having a place to open up the possibilities.
Chris Dahl
Sorry I missed you there! I was there for 1.5 hours - yep - flew in for a 1.5 hour talk and turned around and flew home!!
Tim, thank you so much for your stimulating, yet entertaining, presentation. In addition to describing LibraryThing, you challenged us to think differently about what we do as librarians.
I was listening to this talk, and you said that "when you have two, three tags, you don't have anything." First, I don't think there's many works that have two or three tags, and once you got rid of those that should be combined, what's left isn't of much interest to LibraryThingers.* Likewise, I'm looking at, say, Torg: The Gaunt Man Returns (an arbitrary selection that I don't own, since I fashion myself a good tagger) and note that we've already pulled out the major elements. Pretty much any book I can find where a handful of people have tagged, the major elements are getting labeled multiple times.
* If anyone wants to complain about the limited range of LibraryThingers, I'll compare it to the tagging on LCCN 97186242, which is "Fantasy games", for a set of books, many of which aren't fantasy, that gets tagged on LibraryThing individually and in depth.
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