Thing 21: Why tagging is essential

now what, originally uploaded by S. Balcomb.

One summer, we took to calling my brother-in-law, Tim, Vowel Man, because he had such a talent for picking his Scrabble tiles. We made him a T-shirt using iron on printer paper to celebrate his newly acquired superpower. On the front it read, "Vowel Man: with the power of A, E, I, O, U” and on the back, "And sometimes Y & W". Unfortunately, the iron-on letters did not adhere very well, and after the second washing, the message was a faded, ragged version of what we had imagined. I can't help but think what a cooler, more graphically pleasing shirt we could have made with Zazzle and a digital photo of some scrabble tiles.

So why is tagging essential? That is like asking, “why do we catalog books?” So that we can find the information we need. Sorting and classifying is one of those basic skills that we focus on before we even enter preschool. When we start working at the library, we are told that the library uses classification systems to collocate materials on the same subject to make information easier to find. We add cataloging records to help us locate similar information that might be in other books. It is all about accessing information. Computers have given us keyword searching which means we expanded item records to include more descriptors that we can latch on to in a search. Since photos do not naturally contain text that can be searched by keyword, we need to tag them if we ever want to find them again.

In the article, Flickr + Libraries= Scary, scary, scary - Blog post by Michael Stevens, ALA TechSource, 7/28/2006, Stevens makes the point that you can also use tags to exclude what you don't want. You can tag images, "May Offend." As soon as I heard that, I found myself wanting to run a search on that very term just to test my sensibilities.

Which leads me back to my search for Vowel Man.. When I searched "Flckr" using the term "Scrabble,” the first image I found with all vowels was titled "spells screwed". I debated uploading that image to my blog, but my mother, who has never used the word "screwed" in any but a carpentry context, may read my blog someday and be offended. So I added the tag "vowels” to "Scrabble" and found a more Mom-Friendly captioned photo. I imagine good and accurate tagging means people can filter out (select out?) the content they do not want.