Learning 2.0: It's All about Tagging

I finally tackled the first tagging exercise in our library learning 2.0 program.

I am very likely "tagging" along with the husband later this year on a work trip to Europe. The plan is to catch a train or rent a car and go to Italy. So, of course, I decided to look at Italy in my searching.

When I searched "Italy" in Google, I retrieved 413,000,000 hits. Quite nicely, the Italian Tourism Board was the first result.

Then I moved over to eQuest, the Libraries' online catalog, and conducted a keyword search for Italy. I retrieved 3,211 results.

Then I moved over to searching for Italy as a subject in eQuest. As I remember from my "cataloging" class with Dr. Chan, LOC really lets you look at very specific aspects of a subject. Take a look:

And that's just the first screen!

It's interesting to me how much tagging and library classification systems have in common. People seem to have a strong need to classify and organize things. To place them into categories. And it's pretty clear to me that Web 2.0 tagging is just the newest application of this. I am hopeful and think that tagging might actually draw attention to libraries and library classification again.

Exercise 2:

Now that my professional life has slowed a little -- well, not really slowed, the work flow has just changed -- I have been able to look at this blog, Flickr, and several other Web 2.0 tools I use personally and professionally and see that I have not been very good at tagging! Sometimes it was hard and timeconsuming enough to just get the blog post, or the beach photos, or whatever up there without being expected to actually add tags too! No more! I am going to try to take a moment and add tags.