A few libraries are trying out social tagging: the University of Pennsylvania (UP) was one of the first library adopters with its PennTags (tags.library.upenn.edu/). The site allows UP students, faculty, and staff to bookmark quality Web sites and records in UP’s online catalog and share these resources with others. Additionally UP users can create and share “projects” or groups of links on a single site named for the topic.

PennTags is a site dedicated to academic tagging, but this technology can also be incorporated into an existing library Web presence. Stanford University is also experimenting with social tagging, in order to educate patrons about the library’s resources and to provide a platform for curators to identify quality external Web sites. Instead of a standalone tagging site, the open source content management software Drupal (drupal.org/) forms the base for Stanford’s Information Center site, which also includes wiki and blog modules. From there, the designers have added a del.icio.us module that allows users to find tags organized by subject.

A Columbia Librarian posted a long article about tagging systems and their use in libraries. Interesting reading.

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.