It occurred to me after I posted my main post on tagging that tagging may also be done for those who limit searches to tags, rather than doing full text searches.
Showing posts with label tagging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tagging. Show all posts
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Flick(e)ring
I must confess that I am struggling to keep up with this programme. My initial enthusiasm is definitely flickering. I am so far behind the current Thing. Luckily Things 9 and 10 come as a pair, so I can take two steps towards the goal of Thing 23 at once.
I have come across one or two other sites where people can load and store images, though Flickr is perhaps a bit more professionally set up, and to some extent deals with the licensing of images, which others haven't. Flickr has many lovely images, and many that are amateurish, and I can't imagine are of much interest to any but the posters and their circle. Sifting through the mix takes time. The searches that I tried turned up quantities of results, even though they seemed fairly narrowly defined, and tagging very definitely raises its head again here. I put the name of my library into the search box, and came up with some pictures that were relevant, but many that were not. One person seemed to have tagged an entire album of photographs of a holiday, only partly involving Cambridge, with the same list of tags for each image, relevant or not, so I turned up dozens of images of other places, and only one or two of my institution. Spelling also came into play again here - some of my mis-results were due to that.
As my screen name is Lotusflower, I found a lotus:
It was uploaded by fung1981, and thanks are due to him or her (I don't know which) for a beautiful image.
It is very good of people to allow others to use images without the usual copyright limits. I am not entirely sure how much trust goes into putting images on a site like this, whether there is much of a risk that people will abuse the permissions level, and what can be done about it if so. I must confess that I am amazed at what some people make publicly available on photo sites, particularly images of their children. Whether they do this through ignorance about privacy settings, or the possible risks, I don't know.
Would I use a site like this? I am not much of a photographer, and don't have a digital camera. I have not signed up for the site at present. For my library ... Well, we like to have our images firmly under control, so use a private storage system. If I produced posters, leaflets, etc. regularly, it would perhaps be a useful resource, but I don't. Maybe I will decorate my blog for the time that it is active. I will see how inspired I am! The only use I have to date made of a photo site is for creating e-cards (the site in question has a facility to do this).
I have come across one or two other sites where people can load and store images, though Flickr is perhaps a bit more professionally set up, and to some extent deals with the licensing of images, which others haven't. Flickr has many lovely images, and many that are amateurish, and I can't imagine are of much interest to any but the posters and their circle. Sifting through the mix takes time. The searches that I tried turned up quantities of results, even though they seemed fairly narrowly defined, and tagging very definitely raises its head again here. I put the name of my library into the search box, and came up with some pictures that were relevant, but many that were not. One person seemed to have tagged an entire album of photographs of a holiday, only partly involving Cambridge, with the same list of tags for each image, relevant or not, so I turned up dozens of images of other places, and only one or two of my institution. Spelling also came into play again here - some of my mis-results were due to that.
As my screen name is Lotusflower, I found a lotus:
It was uploaded by fung1981, and thanks are due to him or her (I don't know which) for a beautiful image.
It is very good of people to allow others to use images without the usual copyright limits. I am not entirely sure how much trust goes into putting images on a site like this, whether there is much of a risk that people will abuse the permissions level, and what can be done about it if so. I must confess that I am amazed at what some people make publicly available on photo sites, particularly images of their children. Whether they do this through ignorance about privacy settings, or the possible risks, I don't know.
Would I use a site like this? I am not much of a photographer, and don't have a digital camera. I have not signed up for the site at present. For my library ... Well, we like to have our images firmly under control, so use a private storage system. If I produced posters, leaflets, etc. regularly, it would perhaps be a useful resource, but I don't. Maybe I will decorate my blog for the time that it is active. I will see how inspired I am! The only use I have to date made of a photo site is for creating e-cards (the site in question has a facility to do this).
Friday, 30 July 2010
(Electronic) tagging
Is this so that people can stalk me more effectively? But no, I did not have to enter CILIP as a tag for people working there to locate my blog and post comments about one of my posts. CILIP was just in the text of one of my posts. Given that people are finding my blog without my necessarily having given the posts a relevant tag, I ask myself "Why I should bother?" (the answer being, I suppose, that it is possible that I will have been talking about concepts which haven't been spelled out). At least one of my tags is a bit misleading - my iGoogle page has Audubon birds at the top, which I mentioned in the post, so I entered his name as a tag, but anyone hoping to find information about him, and finding my blog will be pretty disappointed. Indeed, I wonder whether I should leave Audubon as a tag (though as it is in the text of a post, it is, it appears, findable without it).
I have been tagging my posts as I go along (a number of years' cataloguing having trained me beyond help via LC subject headings??). I can't pretend that I have been particularly creative in the tagging, but I guess that I tend towards the practical and functional, in tagging and LC subject headings, and my posts are not particularly wide-ranging, mostly concentrating on the Thing in question.
The theory of classification in the article in the Thing was interesting. It seemed to equate tagging with classification schemes, which have one place where a book will physically sit, but to me they are more like LC subject headings (other subject heading systems are available ...). Granted, tagging doesn't have the constraints of a set system, but you can add more than one subject heading to reflect a book's containing a number of subjects, unlike a classification mark, where only one can be used. I guess that every attempt to categorise will have its faults. Tags allow the user to apply exactly what they want to use, but unless the searcher happens to light on what they have used, their blog (or whatever) may be lost. Subject headings and classification schemes may be more limited, in that someone else has to have decided that the subject is important, and all schemes have biases, but you do at least have the option of going to the source and finding out what has been used (wading through the cross-references, maybe). The spelling of words always has the potential to cause problems. The American wanting articles on colour may not find the English ones when searching on color (unless they are tagged with both spellings, or some other scheme of mapping the variations is used), with tagging and more traditional systems.
I have been tagging my posts as I go along (a number of years' cataloguing having trained me beyond help via LC subject headings??). I can't pretend that I have been particularly creative in the tagging, but I guess that I tend towards the practical and functional, in tagging and LC subject headings, and my posts are not particularly wide-ranging, mostly concentrating on the Thing in question.
The theory of classification in the article in the Thing was interesting. It seemed to equate tagging with classification schemes, which have one place where a book will physically sit, but to me they are more like LC subject headings (other subject heading systems are available ...). Granted, tagging doesn't have the constraints of a set system, but you can add more than one subject heading to reflect a book's containing a number of subjects, unlike a classification mark, where only one can be used. I guess that every attempt to categorise will have its faults. Tags allow the user to apply exactly what they want to use, but unless the searcher happens to light on what they have used, their blog (or whatever) may be lost. Subject headings and classification schemes may be more limited, in that someone else has to have decided that the subject is important, and all schemes have biases, but you do at least have the option of going to the source and finding out what has been used (wading through the cross-references, maybe). The spelling of words always has the potential to cause problems. The American wanting articles on colour may not find the English ones when searching on color (unless they are tagged with both spellings, or some other scheme of mapping the variations is used), with tagging and more traditional systems.
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