TagTeam FAQ

Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » TagTeam (TT) » FAQ

How do I get an account on the Harvard instance of TagTeam?

1. Go to the Harvard instance of TagTeam and click the Sign in link in the upper right corner. Or go directly to the Sign up page.
2. Fill out the form.
   • Note that the Harvard instance of TagTeam is limited to academic or research projects. Use the form to give a brief description of your project. If you want to tag for an existing TagTeam project, just say that.
   • Click the green Sign up button (not the blue Log in button).

Once you have an account in TagTeam, you may create new hubs (projects), tag for those hubs, and authorize others to tag for them as well. To tag for an existing hub, you'll need the permission of the hub owner, which you can request through the "Contact" tab on that hub.

How do I get permission to tag for an existing TagTeam hub?

You may already have a kind of permission to tag for OATP, for example, because someone from OATP invited you to tag. But TagTeam has to know about this permission, and we can't tell TagTeam about it until you have a TagTeam account. That's why we have to separate the previous step from this step, even when you already have "human-level" clearance to go.

1. Log in to TagTeam, and go to the click on the hub for which you'd like permission to tag, for example, the Open Access Tracking Project.
2. Click on that hub's Contact tab in the left sidebar. Fill in the form, for example, by asking for permission to tag. Click Submit.
3. The hub owner will receive the message and make a decision.

What can I do without a TagTeam account, or when I'm not logged in?

You can subscribe to any hub feeds (in RSS, Atom, or JSON), and you can run searches in any hub. You can also view the list of tags already in use at a given hub.

If we compare a TagTeam hub to a blog, then anyone may read the blog, but only those approved by the founder/owner may write posts. Anyone may read TagTeam hub feeds and run searches, but only those approved may tag items, write filters, and perform more advanced functions.

How do I subscribe to a tag feed?

[include: how to view a tag feed without subscribing]

How do I subscribe to a search feed?

[include: how to view a search feed without subscribing]

I'm a hub owner. How do I add taggers to my project?

Recruit them any way you like (F2F, email, and so on). If they're interested, invite them to take the steps: create a TagTeam account, then ask permission to tag for your hub. When their request comes through (by email), approve them, and give them the permissions you want them to have. If your project already has a working tag vocabulary, point them to it, or help them learn it.

I'm a hub owner. How do I prevent spam in my project feeds?

The only people who can tag for your project are those you authorize. If some of them tag items that are off-topic for the project, you can ask them to stop or you can revoke their authorization to tag.

How do I search the items for a given hub?

• Use the TagTeam search engine for the OATP hub (at the bottom of the left sidebar). You needn't have a TagTeam account to do so. The search engine covers all OATP tag records back to the launch of the project in 2009.

• For details on the search features and syntax, see the section of the TagTeam manual on searching. Preview: You can search tags, keywords, or both. You can run phrase searches, wildcard searches, or boolean searches. You can bookmark any search, create a new feed from the results of any search, or add the results of any search to a remix feed combining many different OATP feeds.

• If you use Chrome, you can search OATP directly from the omnibox (the search and URL bar). Go to Chrome Settings, then to Manage search engines. Scroll to the bottom of the page. In the Add a new search engine text field, enter something like "OATP" or "Open Access Tracking Project". In the keyword field, enter "oatp". In the URL field, enter http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/item_search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%s&commit=Go. Then click Done. (If this technique is new to you, you'll be happy to know that Chrome can do the same thing with any other site-specific search engines, such as those at Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and so on.) Once you've set this up and want to search OATP from Chrome, just enter "oatp [search string]" in the omnibox and Chrome will run the OATP search for you. This is fast and elegant. Because Chrome is harnessing the OATP internal search engine, your search string should use the same syntax you'd use with the OATP internal search engine. For example, to search for a tag like oa.policies, search for #oa.policies. You can also use quoted phrases, boolean operators, and so on.

How do I search across two or more hubs?

TagTeam does not yet support this feature. However, most hubs are crawled by Google.

Does TagTeam support user-defined tags?

• Yes. In fact, in the current version, hub owners cannot prevent their authorized taggers from using user-defined tags, except by removing their authorization to tag.

• We developed TagTeam to support a vision of "folksonomy in, ontology out" and get the best of both worlds. As users introduce useful new tags, we can approve and recommend them, and add them to OATP's standard vocabulary. In addition, TagTeam lets us convert deprecated tags to approved tags, automatically, and OATP takes advantage of that power. For more detail on how TagTeam supports the automatic conversion of certain tags to other tags, see the section of the TagTeam manual on tag filters.

How can I tell whether a certain item has already been tagged?

• First, you can search for it in OATP (see the earlier question on search). Second, if you're authorized to tag for OATP, then try to tag the item you're wondering about. If the tag form pops up blank, the item has not yet been tagged. If it pops up pre-populated with tags, then it has already been tagged. In the second case, you could withdraw, knowing that the item has already been tagged, or you could review the tags and add any new ones you think should be added.

How can I tell whether a certain tag is already in use?

• To see whether a given tag is an approved or official project tag, look at the OATP list of approved tags.

• To see whether it's ever been used at all, click on the Tags tab, sort the tags alphabetically, and look for the one you have in mind.

• You could also append the tag to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/, and look at the results. For example, to see whether oa.policies has ever been used, put this URL in your browser, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.policies.

How can I deep-link to the OATP library of all items with a given tag?

• The previous answer showed the way. To link to a given tag library (collection of all the items tagged with a given tag), just append the tag to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/. For example, to link to the tag library for oa.policies, link to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.policies.

How can I deep-link to the OATP library of all items tagged on a given date?

• Just append the date in YYYY/MM/DD format to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/by_date/. For example, to link to the tag library for December 1, 2016, link to this URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/by_date/2016/12/01.

What's the difference between OATP and TagTeam?

• OATP is a social-tagging project. Participants use tags for sharing new developments about OA, and organizing knowledge of the field.

• TagTeam is software to support social-tagging projects, and calls these projects hubs. OATP is one hub within TagTeam.

• OATP could run on almost any tagging platform, and when it launched in 2009 it ran on Connotea. However, existing tagging platforms did not have all the features we wanted and we developed our own, TagTeam. For more background on TagTeam itself, and the features we wanted that didn't exist in other tagging platforms, see our Introduction to TagTeam. For more details on these and other features, also see the TagTeam user manual.

Who's behind OATP?

Peter Suber launched OATP in April 2009. Until mid-2011, it was an overload project, like a blog. In mid-2011, it became one of the initiatives overseen by the grant-funded Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), directed by Suber. Also see the HOAP front page for the HOAP funders, project principals, project coordinators, research assistants, and software developers.