Invitation to Participation
With community tagging, Encore invites users to participate in the discovery process in a whole new way. Now library staff and users alike can add tags that enrich descriptive materials, making it easier to find and understand library holdings. For example, staff of the Ethics Center at University of Nebraska-Lincoln gave over 300 books the tag “Ethics Center.” When you search Encore for that term you get materials on applied ethics and the teaching of ethics—subjects that are difficult to search in traditional subject headings without using a lot of terms. See for yourself in this search for ethics center on UNL’s Encore implementation!
Specialization Made Easy
Ditto with emerging and specialized terms. Anyone who’s concerned about how to behave in cyberspace (and aren’t we all?) would surely want materials addressing that topic to be tagged with the word “netiquette.” And for the medical specialist, a general search using the term “dermatology” may or may not reveal the debate, spreading like a rash among dermatologists, about what to call the examination of skin lesions using a dermatoscope. Is it dermatoscopy or dermoscopy, or simply epiluminescence microscopy? You or I may not care, but these specialized tags help select communities benefit from their knowledge and get the most out of your library’s catalog.