Thing 13: Tagging

I love tagging. I know that there should be some set of agreed upon words to describe a thing, or a subject, but we as librarians need to get away from the antiquated versions of these. "Young Adults" or "Juvenile" anyone? How about my favorite pet peeve from our OPAC: "nonmusical sound recording"... perhaps you mean audiobook?

This is where my other pet peeve comes into play. It is almost impossible in a traditional OPAC to look up a genre. Or especially a subgenre. One place you can is at the Bedford Public Library because they have embraced library things tags and integrated them in the system.

For instance, when I look up Neuromancer, it gives me the regular subject headings, such as

Science fiction.
Hugo Award winner -- 1985.
Hugo Award winners.
Nebula Award winner -- 1984.
Nebula Award winners.

But it also gives me the option at the bottom to look up these tags

20th century artificial intelligence computers cyberpunk cyberspace dystopia Gibson Nebula
Award sci-fi science fiction sf sff speculative fiction virtual reality William Gibson

which I find much more useful if I am wanting more books like this.