I attended a digital dialogue hosted by Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) featuring Jennifer Golbeck and her work in social tagging. Her research inspired me to 1. imagine ways to utilize tags in my own workplace, 2. investigate why we aren’t using tags more often, and 3. think of next steps.
1. Brainstorming
At first, I started thinking about the tags in WorldCat UMD. One of many ways we could utilize tags: A significant collection at Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries celebrates book design: the book form as art. If we think of the books as artwork, we get a unique set of descriptions that could lead new audiences to our holdings. I’m especially thinking of the arts & crafts and art history folks. Tags are opportunities to include metadata about the book’s construction, design, and historical influence that might be too granular for WorldCat.
For outreach initiatives, we could create bookmarks to insert in the books at the circulation desk as customers check out items. The bookmarks would encourage the readers to add tags to WorldCat UMD, stressing ease and opportunity.
Once the tags are in WorldCat UMD, we could study their use and development, and their effectiveness at leading students to resources.
All of this, of course, occurs in an ideal world. After floating down from my enthusiasm over Golbeck’s dialogue, I started thinking more practically about the process.
2. Why this fantastic idea has probably been considered and rejected by more qualified people
The above campaign would be great if our goal were merely to add tags to WorldCat UMD. But it’s always good to ask why people aren’t already adding tags if they have so much potential. At this time, there are several reasons not to go storming through WorldCat UMD using staff time and resources. The main reasons: tagging isn’t easy and it isn’t useful (yet).
To experience tagging from a customer perspective, I decide to tag one of the books from our International Women’s Day Display at Hornbake Library: The Single Girl.
First, I create an individual account in WorldCat UMD. Besides the whole remembering-my-password thing:
- it’s one more step, which means more time the customer has to spend, which may not be worth spending just to add one word to an item’s description
- There’s this scary-looking Notice on the left-hand side of the screen when you create an account:
By accessing and using WorldCat services, you hereby consent to your personal data, and any other data you provide, being transmitted to and stored in the United States of America.
What does “personal data” mean? The privacy concerns are just the same as customers creating an account in EBSCO Host. When we, the academic institution, encourage customers to engage in an activity that requires them to accept this statement, is that consistent with our ethics?
Anyways, I already have a WorldCat UMD account. I find my book and start checking out the tag functionality.
In order to find tags, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. From a web design perspective, scrolling is not ideal (from Chapter 8 of Usability Guidelines).
A major flaw: unless you scroll to the bottom of the page, there is no way to access tags. Advanced search features don’t allow you to browse tags or tag clouds. If I am looking for a book about mental health, I cannot search tags; I have to first find a book tagged “mental health”, then click on the tag from the bottom of the page for similarly tagged items. Also, I cannot perform a multifaceted search; I cannot search tags for a book about mental health + single women.
Subject terms have a small box at the top of the page, so users don’t have to scroll all the way down for access. Not so with tags.
The system does save each tag that I contribute to a book, so I can access a list of tags that, maybe I have considered useful. Perhaps this is useful, but when I am logged into WorldCat UMD, and scroll to the bottom of an item’s page, I see a (vertical) list of every tag I contributed to the item. This means I have to scroll even more to access the tags every user has contributed.
Do I care which tags in the tag cloud have been contributed by me?
Also, even though the instructions say that apostrophes are acceptable punctuation, they aren’t. I cannot create “women’s history” but I am able to create “womens history.” This increases user frustration and disinclination to utilize tags.
To end on a positive note, my tags–while not all encompassing–addressed a broader spectrum of search terms than the Subject words provided by librarians. The Subject words are incredibly helpful and accurate, but as a customer, I have a different relationship with the item that allows me to contribute to the description. For example, I noticed that lesbianism is described by the book’s author as a detrimental result of the single woman’s lifestyle. This statement, coming from a book advertised as a medical official’s case studies, might be of interest to someone researching LGBT perspectives throughout history. This facet had not been represented in the official Subject terms and might increase access.
3. Enough analysis. What can we do?
More research! First, collecting more studies about the ways tags are used, especially from a web design standpoint. Golbeck’s study with the Steve Project created an entirely new platform separate from the institution’s search interfaces. Find studies related to usability focused on where tags are located and their search capability (for example, do people use/would they like to use tags to perform multi-faceted searches).
User studies! Once we’ve collected and reviewed research from other institutions, we should perform user studies using multiple methods (interviews, focus groups, web analytics, etc.) to see how and why customers do, could, and don’t use tags in WorldCat UMD.
Think outside the box! If we really want to promote social tagging, maybe we could allow customers to write tags on the bookmarks we hand out with their item at the circ desk, and when the books are returned, we could add the tags from staff-side accounts. If we can’t make WorldCat UMD’s tags more user-friendly, maybe we can provide a system that is.
Of Books and Boxes 