On Mar 8, 2006, at 4:06 PM, Ian Nebe Barnett wrote:
While this is less of an issue for sites that are obviously community-driven (like the ones you mention above) and can be expected to reflect the opinions of that community, a library catalog is primarily a fact-driven thing and, as such, needs to take care in allowing open end-user additions. No matter how well you delineate the user- supplied data, you can bet that the person who takes offense at someone's tag will also be the one with a spectacular failure of comprehension as to its source.
I think you can eliminate 90+% of the potential for abuse in patron initiated tagging by simply requiring a patron login for adding tags and tying the tags to an individual accountable user. If someone systematically defaces the catalog tags, you quietly turn that capability off. It's not like they're going to run out and get another library card. Patron initiated tagging will get you around some large proportion of the problems with catalogs that use controlled vocabularies that have archaic or obscure terms for common patron requests. In the last few months I've run into two of these in the LC terminology - "fire extinction" as the preferred index term for "fire fighting", and "cookery" as the index term for "cookbooks" - that absolutely cry out for patron tags to start to get around that problem. thanks Ed
