Dear PennTags
Please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s just that I was so excited to meet you — I had so many preconceptions, I had heard so much about you. And then when I actually met you, you seemed kind of standoff-ish and, I admit, sort of different from what I thought you’d be. But I still like you — don’t get me wrong.
When I first heard about you I thought: finally! A way for scholars to tag up an OPAC as well as electronic journals — a tool enabling social discovery by a defined community swimming through carefully selected resources. In short, I thought you’d be more sophisticated and more focused than del.icio.us. 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.
But when we actually met you were so confusing (and I’m not alone in thinking so). 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:
What does it mean that Lauder_Institute_Area_Studies dwarfs united_states? I think it means that you haven’t gotten around enough to render a representative or even very interesting snapshot of the Penn community — so until you do, I suggest you don’t wear this raw data on your sleeve.
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.
I guess my point is, first impressions are important — so you should use your home page to introduce yourself, rather than show off. I finally found my way to the “About” page (tiny button, my friend! why so shy?), a page that finally addresses the question, “What is PennTags”? And here you got kind of weird. You started pretending that del.icio.us doesn’t even exist. Or, to put it another way, you said almost nothing about yourself that couldn’t be said about del.icio.us. You bragged:
Have you ever bookmarked a web page and then can’t find it again in your mass of bookmarks? The beauty of PennTags is that it allows you to organize your bookmarks/resources exactly the way you want and it lets you share them with others. It’s both personal and portable.
Well ok, but I thought your beauty, PennTags, would be that you would be different from del.icio.us — that instead of letting anyone tag anything just ‘out there’ on the open web, you’d let a defined community — namely, Penn and sub-communities within Penn — tag things that are available by virtue of being at Penn. Otherwise, why reinvent the wheel? 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.
Jumping into some of your posts, though, I found that your users are in fact using you as I thought they might — they are tagging your library’s catalog records, and they are tagging articles available in your library’s database, as well as outside websites. Following these links put me on quite different adventures.
When the item tagged is in the OPAC
OPAC tagging is pretty darn sweet — and you pulled this off with Voyager, no less. When I clicked on a post referring to a book on Godard, I didn’t get to access the book (obviously), but I was routed to its catalog record, and I found that the user-contributed tag and summary had made the trip with me, and appeared in a yellow box right in the OPAC:
After seeing this trick, PennTags, I started to warm to you. People who know nothing about you or about tagging or even about bookmarking are bound to wonder what these yellow notes are on showing up on the bottom of OPAC records — maybe you’ll recruit more users this way, and get smarter. At the very least, you’re giving library records a sense of life; any way to enliven the OPAC with user contributions is a-ok with me.
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.
When the item tagged is in a journal database
What about when someone posts and tags a journal article in you? I clicked on such a record, and, not to my surprise, got dumped at a Penn database log-in screen — which means that if I were affiliated with Penn, I’d go right to the article. Since I’m not, I see nothing — no user summations, no fun yellow boxes. This begs the questions again about who is using PennTags, and for what purpose. 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.
That said, clicking on the title of another posted article, a JSTOR title, took me — much to my surprise — right into the article; I was ushered straight in thanks to my own institution. That experience started me dreaming again, PennTags, about an openURL world, filled with cross-institutional tagging of academic assets. At the very least it renewed my hope that I might find you of use while waiting for my own library to get tagging off the ground.
When the item tagged is an outside website
Then there are the outside websites that are being posted and tagged in you, just as they’re tagged in del.icio.us. As you know, I think it’s redundant and a little silly to use you just for this purpose, but I’m also warming to the idea of tagging websites right alongside OPAC records and journal articles. You see, PennTags, I’m open to persuasion; you just haven’t taken the time to articulate the benefits of this mix. 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. That’s a big step, and it’s one to think about — not take for granted.
Yeah, inside/outside tagging has plenty of potential, no doubt about it, but here again I’m a little let down. Here’s the deal, PennTags: 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.
But look around, PennTags: you operate in a world full of productive distinctions. You even list some, shyly — they get buried in a section called “More Tagging Tips”:
How hard would it be to invite your users to think along these lines, gently, somewhere in the tagging process? Can tagging evolve to something beyond a single ‘fill in whatever you want’ open field? I know you don’t want to come across as bossy or proscriptive or — god forbid — librarian-like, but I wonder if just a couple of criteria particularly useful to your academic community (say Topic and Relevance) could be quietly promoted, just as del.icio.us already subtly promotes tagging uniformity through ‘recommended tags.’
The thing to keep your eye on is use: how these tags are used by actual populations, in actual classes or other sub-groupings, for actual purposes. I find it pretty weird that you’re asking people to think about tagging with an uncle in mind — unless this is an uncle at Penn. Relevance is a subjective and fairly meaningless call against a wide-open horizon (where many uncles live), but within the context of english242 students working collectively on a presentation about Keats’s illness, say, “Relevance” becomes a powerful way of characterizing a resource.
Imagine, too, if you allowed any kind of distinction among users — how interestingly instructors and students, say, could interact within a classroom framework as what they are (in the institution’s eye) through you. Or professors and research assistants. Or members of a class and those outside the class. Or librarians. Or alumni. These distinctions shape the day-to-day life of your campus, and though I suspect you imagine yourself to be leveling the playing field in exciting new ways, you don’t have to dumb the field down that much. Nor do user distinctions need to control the way people use you. Building them in would only help when it become desirable to browse or subscribe to the tagging work of a certain subset of the campus community. Here’s your advantage over del.icio.us: you operate in a circumscribed world organized around definable purposes, roles, means, events.
I think you’d be even cooler if you presented yourself as not just another collective knowledge base, but as the way that only Penn could make the knowledge of the world work for definable ends. That’s why I think your most promising feature is ‘Projects’. 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.
Well, PennTags, you can guess by the way I’ve gone on here that I actually am pretty attracted to you, and I look forward to seeing how you mature. You’re raising awareness of tagging in academic settings — and you’re not just sitting around wondering about what that might mean — you’re actually putting tags into motion. That’s the only way any of us is really going to learn how this 2.0 phenom might work for us. So — way to be, & keep in touch.
Your PennPal,
Mark
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 4:00 PM and filed under Academia, Libraryworld, Tagging. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.
I can’t resist responding. I am a Reference Librarian at Penn, and the chair of the PennTags team. First, thanks for your kind words about PennTags. We are quite proud of it, and excited to see what kinds of uses will grow out of it. And it looks like you have seen some of what is good about PennTags, and identified some of the same potential enhancements that we’re thinking of.
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:
Posted on 20-Jun-06 at 3:43 pm | Permalink“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.)
A most generous reply, and an salutary reminder that PennTags is under development. One might not guess that from the outside — ie, from the site itself. I’m looking forward to the fall launch.
For the inspiring work, as well as the occasion to learn more about it, Clayfox says: Thank you.
Posted on 20-Jun-06 at 10:38 pm | Permalink[...] Indeed, I’ve been happy to net responses from producers of projects covered here — reacting to or extending my quick [...]
Posted on 20-Jun-07 at 5:26 pm | Permalink[...] perform. Unfortunately, this can’t be done without a U Penn login, but Mark Phillipson’s Clayfox blog provides a screen shot of a catalogue page with tag references and some behind-the-scenes details as [...]
Posted on 06-Dec-07 at 7:35 pm | Permalink