Tagging

I went ahead and tagged my photos in Flickr for fun. I'm an advocate of tagging and natural language searches. Your average library patron knows little if anything about controlled vocabularies and will give up a search if the terms used do not match the appropriate subject heading. Ideally, tags and controlled vocabularies can work together. Most folks like and understand the Google-type search, so libraries and catalogs should incorporate both. In a way, we use tagging in our school catalog. If students are not pulling up an item we know would be relevant using their search terms, we go into the record and add those terms to the content notes or summary so they are accessible. The problem with this method is that you end up retrieving more irrelevant items when you add terms at random like this. With our small collection, it isn't a problem. With a big collection, however, the results list might be too overwhelming to sift through. Folksonomies are obviously more wrought with inaccuracy and bias, but the pros probably still outweigh the cons.