Tagging and The Scotsman Digital Archive

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Archive, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Tools and Services, User Generated, del.icio.us |

Following on from some of the issues raised in “When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing“.  

The team behind the Scotsman Digital Archive - a searchable archive of The Scotsman newspaper from 1817-1950 developed during 2005 - http://archive.scotsman.com/ - developed functionality that allows users to “clip” and “tag” articles of interest that they might want to get back to later.

Scotdman ArchiveThis is important in the context of a relatively large repository - and especially important when searching across text extracted via OCR from historical material. 

The tagging functionality allows users to organise, group and locate articles easily and was quickly adopted by the user community as the benefits were substantial and obvious.

Clearly this tagging adds a great deal of value to the archive, providing some structure and pathways to difficult to find or significant material that could ultimately benefit the wider community of users.

The next obvious stage of development would have been to develop the social/community side of this by allowing users to share their tags with other users, make them public and connect with each other.  This reinforces the principle that the best way to get users to add value to data is to do it in such a way that they don’t realise they are doing so - I guess this is the same as saying provide a clear incentive (see Amazon, Google Maps, Listal.com etc).  It also goes without saying that it should be as pain-free as possible.

The other point to note here is that in certain circumstances you can get users to tag for the greater good - and not just as a by-product of some personal benefit.  You can see this in del.icio.us where individuals can develop into experts through their consistent and regular tagging of material on specific subject areas.  These experts can eventually develop a “network” of like minded indivuduals and attract “fans” who track what they are tagging via RSS.  This network effect is one of the most powerful aspects of del.icio.us.  The profile that the experts receive from their peers within the community is a great incentive to continue tagging. 

[Disclosure:  Please note author is former General Manager of scotsman.com.]

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