The first three articles I found for this assignment I found through Google Scholar. Although the articles generally had links which led to the reference, this did not always lead to the full text of the article. For one article, entitled "Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us," the link provided by the initial reference brought me from its ERIC listing to the Library Journal home page, where I had to search for the article using the site search engine. Once I linked to this article rather than the initial listing link, the number of concurrent tags went from 0 to over 1000. I was pleased to note that others in the class had found this article useful as well.
When looking at tags that people from other institutions, or from the general public, had created, I found a number of things to be true. Firstly, many people did not understand, as I didn't initially, that putting spaces in between words turns them into two separate tags. As such, an article or site might be tagged "social" and "bookmarking" or "web" and "2.0" by someone who did not understand how this function worked. Secondly, I found that the general public, as opposed to other LIS students, preferred sites that aggregated information on the topic at hand, such as TechCrunch, rather than individual articles.
On the whole, I was interested to read what others in the class had found for this topic, and was even able to find articles that had been tagged for an LIS course at another university. However, the fact that so many of the tags were broken up into two or more words indicates to me both the shortcomings of this medium as a form of taxonomy and the need for further public education on the subject.
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