'Tagging' was a major theme of the 2008 Conference. Interested participants attended paper sessions and a keynote presentation. The Tagging Community session was a forum for discussion of the topic.
Here is a short report from the convenor (Liddy Nevile):
I would like to report on the Tagging Session which was, as usual, a fun event in which people posed some ideas and challenged each other.
I am very grateful to those who prepared and presented their work in this session (available presentations linked from the conference program). We also had a number of other sessions at the Conference to do with tagging, so it was a kind of open-doors event.
I think it is fair to say that we did not feel a strong motivation to do what often happens in such DC communities, and form task groups to do development, but rather agreed that tagging is an area in which the research community is still interested. I think there is support for the idea that tagging is rather different from other metadata activities in that there is not a strong motivation for interoperability but rather a lot of localisation that is supported by tagging. (Here, I am taking the 'core' idea of DC metadata as opposed to other, more locally specific metadata as in application profiles, and recognising that the research shows that taggers tend to belong to communities, and use the community discourse.)
Sarah Hayman (http://www.edna.edu.au) prepared a presentation (http://dc2008.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/hayman.pdf) that was kindly delivered by Helen Galatis.
Andrés Monroy-Hernández is the Web master for a site used by young people (http://scratch.mit.eu). He prepared a short presentation (http://www.slideshare.net/andresmh/how-do-kids-tag-presentation) about how the young people use tags almost to manipulate their community, really getting the message about the 'social' value of tags.
But I want to recognise that there are two questions that might lead people to think about development. Ana Alice Baptista and Elisa found, in their research, that taggers do sort of 'metadata' tagging and then also tag to show the relationship they have with the resource, for example, the purpose they have for the resource, such as wanting to tag it so they remember 'to print' it. Doug Campbell had earlier asked the question, what DC element are people using for their tags when including them in amongst DC metadata but not specifically teasing them out into 'subject', 'creator' etc....
All in all, I think the feeling is that the tagging community might be one that is interested in research more than development and so a research community is appropriate.
I have enjoyed my couple of years convening the tagging community and am thrilled that we now have two real community leaders ready to take over. I welcome Dr. Eva Mª Méndez Rodríguez,. Associate professor, Dpto. Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Dr Ana Alice Baptista, Professor, Universidade do Minho, Portugal to these positions.
I believe the community can work together to develop a strong research agenda, as Ana has exemplified over the last couple of years, starting with some early discussion on the community email lists. I am sure that by working together with the DCMI management, some research initiatives in this field can show how research across the range of DC issues can become a strong, collaborative effort. I hope so!
Liddy 2008-10-07