TagTeam FAQ

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How do I get a TagTeam account?

  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).

How do I create a TagTeam hub?

  • Once you create an account and log in, you'll see a big blue button on the front page that says, Start a hub. Just press it and you're nearly done. Give your hub a title, a nickname, and a description, and you're done. You may create more than one hub if you like.
Once you've created a hub, you may tag for it and authorize others to tag for it as well. To tag for an existing hub, created by someone else, 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 a hub owned by someone else?

  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?

Without signing up or signing in, you can:

  • See a list of all the hubs running on a given instance of TagTeam.
  • Run searches in any hub.
  • Subscribe to any of the feeds published by the hub.
  • Use the Contact tab to contact the hub owner.
  • Request permission to tag for an existing hub. But you must have a TagTeam account before your request can be approved.
  • Select any tab (except the Team or Community tab) on any hub and view its information in read-only mode. Among other things, this means you can view the lists of tags at a given hub. But you must create an account and log in if you want to create a new hub or make any changes to an existing hub.

How do I actually tag for a given hub?

  • First install the tagging bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.
    • Log in to TagTeam, and go to any hub for which you are authorized to tag.
    • Click on the Bookmarks tab in the left sidebar.
    • Drag the Add to TagTeam link to your browser's bookmarks toolbar. (You'll only see this link if you're logged in and authorized to tag for this hub.)
  • When you're viewing a page you want to tag, click on the bookmarklet and fill in the pop-up form.
The method is the same for hub owners and non-owners who are authorized to tag for a given hub.

How do I revise the tags for a given item?

After you've tagged an item, you may want to add new tags, or modify or remove existing tags. Here's how.
  1. Log in to TagTeam and go to the right hub.
  2. Go to the tag record for the item you want to update.
    • For example, run a search or scroll through the list of items until you find the one you want to update. Then click on the link in the item's title. That takes you to the tag record for that item.
  3. Click on the Filters tab in the left sidebar.
  4. Chose one of the three options (add, remove, modify a tag), and fill in the form.
  5. Another way to add new tags (but not to remove or modify them) is to return to the original page on the web, and click on the bookmarklet. The tagging form will pop up prepopulated, and you can add new tags directly through the form. When you add new tags this way, you need not be logged in to TagTeam.
  • Permission to tag for a hub doesn't include permission to create item-level filters. If you have the first but not the second, then ask the hub owner for the second.
  • Similarly, permission to create item-level filters doesn't include permission to create feed-wide or hub-wide filters. If you want the latter, ask the hub owner.

How does TagTeam support user-defined tags?

  • All authorized taggers can invent new tags while tagging.
  • Once they type a few characters, they'll see existing tags that start with those letters. But these are only suggestions, and the tagger can disregard all of them.

How does TagTeam support ontologies or standardized tag vocabularies?

  • Hub owners (and users with appropriate permission) can convert any tag to any other tag. The primary tool for this job is a hub-wide filter. A hub-wide filter changing tag A to tag B will first change all existing instances of A to B, in that hub, and then stand ready to change all future instances of A to B, in that hub.
    • For example, if some taggers for a project use "ship" (singular) and some use "ships" (plural), the project managers simply have to decide which one they prefer and write a filter to change the deprecated tag to the preferred tag.
    • Or if the project formerly recommended "black-hole" and later decides that "black_hole" would be better, it can write a hub-wide filter to change the former to the latter, past and future.
    • TagTeam calls this feature "folksonomy in, ontology out".
    • In other tagging platforms, taggers can modify their own tags, but only their own tags. Moreover, these modifications tend to be retroactive-only, not prospective. In TagTeam, hub owners and hub members with permission can change any of the tags in the hub, and change them for the past and the future. This is a powerful way for project managers to manage the evolution of an ontology or standard vocabulary. At the same time, new taggers should realize that their tags might be changed by the same process.
  • 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 do I subscribe to a tag feed?

  • First, find any occurrence of the tag in which you're interested. Click on it and you'll get a pop-up menu. Click on the top option ("View items tagged with [TAG]"). That will take you to the tag home page, also called the tag library.
  • On the tag library page, you'll see the three feed icons in the upper right corner (RSS, Atom, JSON). Click the format of your choice, and put the feed URL in your favorite feed aggregator.
  • If you want to subscribe to more than one tag feed, you can subscribe to each one separately. Or you can combine them into one remix feed and subscribe to the remix feed. Naturally you can share the URL to the remix feed just as easily as you can share the URL of any simple or individual feed.
  • Finally, of course, you can view the tag library without subscribing to its feed. For example, just bookmark its URL and revisit whenever you want to an update. The page is organized like a blog with the most recent items on top.

How do I subscribe to a search feed?

  • First run a search.
  • On the search-results page, you'll see the three feed icons in the upper right corner (RSS, Atom, JSON). Click the format of your choice, and put the feed URL in your favorite feed aggregator.
  • The search-results page also offers a permalink for the search (just below the search box). If you bookmark the search, every time you return, you'll get the latest results. You can also share the permalink in emails, social-media posts, or publications.
  • The search-results page also offers you an option ("Add to a remix feed") to make the search feed a component in a remix feed.
  • Subscribing to a search, bookmarking one, or incorporating it into a remix feed is useful even for simple searches. But it's even more useful for complicated searches that would be difficult to recreate or retype, for example, searches using boolean operators, proximity operators, quoted phrases, and so on. In the latter case, refine your initial search until it does just what you want. Then take the following steps.
  • Finally, of course, you can view the search results without subscribing to them, bookmarking them, or incorporating them into remix feeds.

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

  • Invite them to (1) create a TagTeam account, and (2) ask permission to tag for your hub (both described above). When their request comes through (by email), approve them (in the Team or Community tab of your hub), 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 your authorized taggers tag off-topic items, you can ask them to stop. Or you can revoke their permission to tag through the Team or Community tab of your hub.

How do I create a private hub or use private tags?

  • You can't. TagTeam outputs are open access.
  • We might add private hubs and private tagging in a future version.

How do I search a given hub?

  • Go to the home page for that hub in TagTeam, and use the search box at the bottom of the left sidebar.
  • 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 feeds.
  • If you use Chrome, you can search a given 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 the name of the hub (for example, "OATP" or "Open Access Tracking Project"). In the keyword field, enter a short nickname (for example, "oatp"). In the URL field, enter http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/item_search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%s&commit=Go, replacing /oatp/ with the name or number of the hub you want to search. Then click Done. Once you've set this up and want to search (for example) OATP from Chrome, just enter "oatp [search string]" in the omnibox and Chrome will run the OATP search for you. Because Chrome is harnessing TagTeam's internal search engine for that hub, your search string should use the same syntax you'd use it TagTeam itself. For example, to search for a tag like sample-tag, search for #sample-tag. 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, TagTeam hubs are crawled by Google.

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

  • First, you can search for it in that hub (see the previous question).
  • Second, if you're authorized to tag for that hub, 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 in a certain hub?

  • Go to the hub's home page within TagTeam, and click on the Tags tag in the left sidebar. Sort the tags alphabetically, and look for the one you have in mind.
  • You could also append the tag you're wondering about to this URL template, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/HUB/TAG/, replacing HUB with the TagTeam name or number of that hub, and replacing TAG with the tag you're wondering about.
  • Some hubs post a (public, evolving) list of project-approved tags. For example, see the

To see whether a given tag is an approved or official project tag, look at the for the Open Access Tracking Project.

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

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

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