Loosely defined, tagging means that you have provided something with a label, some sort of classification or category, or a way to track it. Scientists tag animals in the wild. Grocers tag canned goods with price labels or bar codes. In the game, one child tags another as being "it".
In recent years, the Web has applied this word to mean a specific function in its virtual reality. On the Internet, tagging is now defined as labeling objects that exist there. Some examples of objects which can be tagged are pictures, books, articles, Youtube videos, or blogs.
You may have already performed tagging without realizing that is what it's officially called. I've posted pictures on my Facebook and Myspace pages for years now, and have labeled them so my family and friends would know who's in the pictures. Those labels are considered tags. Though useful for my intentions, tags on the Internet also serve a far larger purpose.
Tags can be read by search engines and used to organize, categorize, and identify various forms of information available on the Internet. They help to bring a small measure of order to the vast chaos of data posted daily. When I first learned about tagging in my librarianship class, I had some difficulty imagining exactly how tags could assist me in finding information I might want. I have since performed a search for information on my blog topic - digitization - using only tags, and was pleasantly surprised to obtain useful information immediately in this way.
To perform my search, I first visited a website called LibraryThing at http://www.librarything.com/ and opened a free account with them. LibraryThing has over 44 million books cataloged online for the benefit of its users. It allows users to perform searches by author, title, subject, tags, and several other ways.
Once I had my account set up, I clicked on the Search tab and entered "digitization" into the Tag search box and clicked Search:
(click on image above to enlarge / see full image)Next, I read through the results it provided:
(click on image above to enlarge / see full image)Finally, I clicked on one and looked at the book I had selected.
(click on image above to enlarge / see full image)
Notice at the bottom of the image directly above, there is a list of words associated with this book. Those words are all the tags assigned to this particular book within LibraryThing. One of these tags, digitization, is how I was able to find this particular book out of 44 million in a matter of seconds.
I also decided to try a search for a book regarding digitization projects for academic libraries using Books In Print (BIP), a database I can access through my college, and then see what tags were provided for it at LibraryThing. I performed a keyword search with the words "digitization," "academic," and "library." My search yielded 53 matches. I pulled up one of these books in LibraryThing:
New Challenges Facing Academic Librarians Today: Electronic Journals, Archival Digitization, Document Delivery, Etc by Jean Caswell
Here is what the tag cloud for that book looks like:
(click on image above to enlarge / see full image)The truly great thing about tagging is that anyone can do it. This means that everyone is able to help organize the information available on the Internet at will. The only real downside I see to tagging is that, unfortunately, anyone can do it. Someone who's never even read the book above could, if they wanted to, post a tag for the book that has nothing to do with its subject matter - like "rodeo" or "amusement parks".
It is my hope that taggers will remember that tagging on the Internet is not a kid's game. Tagging succeeds on the honor system, and is performed on a goodwill basis. Done right, it has the potential for helping Internet users navigate the Web a little faster and easier, which is truly a huge accomplishment given the size and scope of this vast environment.
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