Tagging -- Thing 8

Tagging is an important thing for our patrons to use on our catalog for finding things that are similar to what they are reading. For example, if I have read one of the Shopaholic books and want to read something similar in nature but not the same author, I can look at the tags that are associated with the last book and click on potential tags such as chick lit which is extremely useful when our own catalog system does not have as much cataloging overlay in terms of subject headings. It is important to note that in a busy library system this has been helpful to remove the workload from our catalogers and put in the hands of an external vendor. Is this better? Is this vendor more experienced in terms of what popular culture has deemed as the appropriate structure for these tags? So far, my own experience with our catalog and LibraryThing has been a positive one. I have been able to better assist patrons who are looking for those items that do not have the subject headings assigned to them that will be helpful in assisting me to find other items for them. Let's go back to the chick lit example. LibraryThing does a great job of pulling other titles that are chick lit and providing a link to those titles. What it does not do is provide all formats of those titles so it still takes a little tweaking to find a specific format for the reader. Overall , this is an extremely useful tool for us at FPL. Whether or not it replaces subject headings, I must say yes it does. For other libraries, this option may not be useful!