[Dspace-general] Tagging in Dspace

[Pat Galloway]

Let's face it, if the submitters do the metadata, it's generally the 
equivalent of tagging, especially the addition of subject terms. We've 
been discussing tagging in that context, seeing subject-term addition by 
submitters as a way of explicitly harnessing the knowledge of a 
particular community of practice (or designated user community, or 
DSpace community) to develop better and more current ways of finding 
things based on their current research. But it would be advantageous to 
invite others in the same community of practice but not formally 
submitters to add value in that way and then (because it potentially 
adds value) make that tagging available as a user choice to anyone 
entitled to see the materials so tagged--and to appropriate harvesters 
too. Then again, maybe someone would like to create (or has created) a 
mashup that allows people to tag materials in any DSpace as external 
commentary on collections; as an anthropologist I think a lot about tags 
coming from many different cultural perspectives on the same materials, 
and how much that could enrich repository collections for international 
audiences.
Pat Galloway
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin