Tagging in Real Space

Tagging isn't just confined to Internet content anymore.  Harvard University Libraries hosted a forum this week, "Social Tagging @ Harvard: A Del.ici.ous Alternative or Passing Flickr?," that looked at the online practice of tagging and sought to weigh the separate techniques to determine the best method of taxonomy.

Participants included: Research librarian Michael Hemment, Ph.D. who has blogged on a number of Web 2.0 tools and their application in scholarly research and libraries and Berkman Fellow David Weinberger, who, in addition to having a forthcoming book on the topic of tagging, is an expert in the field.  David wrote an extensive blogpost - including Q & A - following the forum, and the event was recorded and can be found over at MediaBerkman.

American art museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Cleveland Museum of Art have all given tagging a try as well.  Allowing the public to define the pieces in their own vocabulary is returning some interesting results, as the NY Times reports that, "more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum’s documentation."