Legal Research

Tagging At U. Michigan Library

By Simon Fodden

MTagger is a tool developed at the University of Michigan to let online library users tag various library resources. For instance, a registered user can tag any item from the main catalogue, Mirlyn. Those not logged in can see the tags and the tag-clouds that appear for every item, and can view the resources bearing a given tag. You can see an invitation to tag an item in the image that appears in this post “below the fold.” At the moment there are just under 300 tags in the tag cloud for all items (where “screwball comedy” and “nouvelle vague” figure very large - literally!).

in the announcement on RSS4LIB, Ken Varnum explains the goal this way:

[Tagging] will allow users to share knowledge about library resources with each other, to enable quick-and-dirty subject guides to be produced, and — we hope — to bring researchers together via their individual tag clouds. As research moves online, chance meetings in the stacks of researchers with overlapping interests become even more rare. Through tagging, we hope to be able to recreate some of those synergistic interactions as one researcher finds a tag of interest, and through that, the other researcher.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 02, 2008 (boomark / email).