For the inspiring work, as well as the occasion to learn more about it, Clayfox says: Thank you.

Some points:

1. A mea culpa: We should have started a public project blog to describe planned features for PennTags and known issues in the use of it. There, we could have answered most of your concerns months ago when the first blog posts started to appear in the library world wondering about the birds, and other things. I wish we had done that, and I hope we get to it fairly soon.

2. PennTags is not finished — we haven’t done half of what we hope to do yet. We hear lots and lots of questions about why we haven’t done something that we are working on doing but haven’t finished yet. We have been adding features, sorting out policies, and writing documentation. This summer, we are adding lots of features, re-writing some documentation, and spending time on the design of the site (for the first time, really). However, as we have done no publicity for PennTags at this point and have not launched it publicly (it’s been up for many months, but only used by a small set of students and librarians who have been personally introduced to it, or have somehow found it on their own), we haven’t worried too much about telling the public what we’re working on. So, we haven’t spent much time apologizing for the incomplete look and feel, as we have never launched the service as a completed project. When we launch in the fall, it will still not have all of the features we have planned, or all of the functionality we’d like to implement. But, at least then, the site you see will be the result of a reasonable planning process, though still not finished.

Now to the specific issues that came up in the Clayfox post:
Clayfox says:
“I thought: finally, it will be easy for a specific class or a set group of scholars to sift together through premium resources: collaborative discovery centered on the information source most unique to Penn, the Penn library.”
I think you answered that yourself quite nicely: “You’re actually allowing your users to bring resources into your library, in a way. Rather than reinventing a wheel, you’re melting a wall.” But, you say “you just haven’t taken the time to articulate the benefits of this mix.” Since we have actually personally introduced PennTags to virtually every user so far, we have found that the benefits of this mix are immediately apparent to most people who use PennTags. I have found in my work as a reference librarian that almost noone needs to be convinced that it would be easier if they could link to library resources and non-library resources in the same place.

Clayfox says:
“Your home page hit me right off the bat with pictures of birds and a big tagcloud, a cloud that seemed more random than representative:”
The birds, (they will be explained on the new site in some way, i’m not sure how yet): The avocets on our page are tagged, ie, they have little metal bands around their legs. The idea is that, like your links, these birds are tagged and then set loose to move about the world. But, when you want them, you can always find them based on their tags. The idea for the metaphor came from our designer, and while many of us were confused at first, we’ve all grown attached to the birds at this point. The new design will certainly include birds, though possibly not so many.
The tagcloud: It certainly is representative of what’s in the database as it currently is. After we launch PennTags to the entire Penn Community this fall, we hope and expect that the tagcloud will change to reflect the diverse interests of the Penn Community. I love the tagcloud, but I recognize that we need more up front explanation of PennTags when we launch the page, so the new design will incorporate a good deal more explanation.

Clayfox says:
“I know your type — you’re enamored of presenting data as it comes into your system — makes you seem extra dynamic. But until you get more play, you’re not delivering useful information with your overall clouds and ‘latest tagged’ lists. In fact, I doubt such look-ma-it’s-web2.0 features will ever be that useful to anyone, however big you get.”
Ouch. I really like the tagcloud, and have fun looking at the list of recent tags. I don’t have anything else to say about that beyond what I say above.

Clayfox says: about our obvious similarity to delicious:
“Ignoring the popular kid & just pretending to be him won’t impress many who are likely to be drawn to you in the first place.”
When I introduce classes to Penntags, I always start by asking if they’ve heard of delicious. If they have, I say something about how we totally stole their ideas and built a tool that would work like them but allows us to tag library materials in addition to material on the public web. The first couple of times I presented to a class about PennTags, I would start by showing them delicious and explaining how it works. But, then, by the time I got to PennTags, people were really confused. So, after introducing PennTags to a couple of classes and finding that almost noone had ever heard of delicious, I started just asking if people knew about delicious or flickr, saying it’s like them, and then showing PennTags. I’ve had much better luch with that kind of introduction. People get PennTags when I show it to them, and they love the idea. So, when the team wrote the documentation, we decided not to confuse them with delicious talk.
However, we recognize that PennTags is a natural fit for those Penn people who are already using delicious. so, hopefully by the fall, we will be able to import and export from delicious. We’re not ignoring delicious at all. We are just trying not to confuse people.

Clayfox says:
“OPAC tagging is pretty darn sweet — and you pulled this off with Voyager, no less”
Thanks. We are very excited about the potentials to learn about our collections, our subject headings, and our reader’s behaviours through this feature. As with the rest of PennTags, it’s still a work in progress. And we are implementing those features that work as we go.

Clayfox says:
“But I wonder how you’ll manage any significant success — imagine ten such yellow PennTag records clinging onto a record in the catalog. You’ll have to be careful to keep a balance between authoritative metadata and folksonomy, between succinct official catalog records and long contributed summations.”
I agree. It will be interesting to see. Of course, we will always make sure that our bibliographic records remain pure. How much other stuff will appear on that page is still getting sorted out. Also, we will certainly have links back to PennTags and a description of what it is in addition to a reasonably set of rules for displaying annotations of any lenth or number.

Clayfox says:
“Frankly, I felt ignored by you here. If you are of, by, & for people behind Penn’s walls, then perhaps you should live behind that wall too — it’s not particularly interesting, for someone who can’t get at resources, to see how they’re being tagged.”
I’m sorry. We have talked a lot about the potential for making something like a .eduTags. But, we haven’t gotten to it yet, as we’re still hammering out the basic functionality in PennTags. And I disagree. I think it’s interesting to see how someone is tagging something even if I can’t easily get to what they’re tagging.

Clayfox says:
“I think you could be a little more proactive about what academic tagging could or even should be. Could it be hierarchical? Might it be user-faceted? Are there ways to enforce best practices? By offering little firm guidance, you’re once again playing pseudo-del.icio.us, leaving everything up to an undifferentiated swamp.”
Again, I think we just disagree here. I think that a full folksonomy has wonderful potential. What I think we need are tools to help users tidy their tags, which is why we are working on building universal edit abilities (ie, change all of my “catalogs” to “catalogues”). We are excited about seeing how people think about our resources. If it’s messy, it’s going to be messy, though we have some really smart programmers who look forward to using intersections of tags and clusters, etc, to build useful tools for users to find similar links.

Clayfox says:
“Right now you only allow one owner post to a given project, but maybe in the future you’ll loosen up and let many users work on a given project — and maybe even specified classes of users. Then, I suspect, the RSS functionality you’ve already built in would start to be useful not merely to the curious, but to a much more involved user-base: the tasked.”
That’s the plan — it’s actually pretty tough to figure out exactly how sharing a project will work but we’re sorting it out. Wait for fall (though you’ll still have to be a Penn person to participate.)