I've been working on the flannelboard factory website. I love how it's turning out. The wiki format makes me feel really comfortable with imperfection, though more about that in a minute.
I created a flickr account in order to store and manage my flannelboard photos...and I've been tagging them. So that knocks out a few of these 21 things with one stone. Or whatever the analogy should be.
One of the things I love about tags + the Internet is how this function allows things to be equally categorized (and thus located/found) in multiple places. So I don't have to decide if a story belongs in the file for food, turkeys, Thanksgiving, holidays, my own designs, felt-only designs, designs smaller than 5", et cetera. Something I don't love about tags/labels is that it sometimes seems like so much extra work to come up with tags, and keep them consistent. And I'm saying that as someone who loves creating thesauri and indices! I think I just get a little lazy sometimes when using Web 2.0. It seems more ephemeral, and thus less important to create excellent tagging. But even as I work on my wiki, I realize that good tagging will make the website really easy to use. Since I would like to eventually share it with my colleagues in a formal way, I want to work on making the tags, if not perfect, at least orderly and helpful.
I collected stamps for ages, and although I would generally organize them in albums by country, as is usual, I really wanted a way to also label and categorize them by other interesting features - such as what they depict, unusual size or shape, and so forth. I don't know if I would want to digitize my stamp collection (still too much work at this point in technological history) because it's so fascinating to examine the objects themselves, but at the same time it would be amazing to quickly call up all the stamps with bicycling themes, for example.
But, let's be honest, if I am a serious collector, I'll just remember where all those stamps are and be able to find them in an instant. Same as I can dig through my huge box of flannel board stories (which are each in a ziploc bag, no flags or titles or anything) and easily pick out the ones that fit my requirements. I can't quite do that with library books... that is, pull all the picture books that fit a certain theme without using the catalog first, but I feel like managing the juvenile collection at this branch for 3 1/2 years has made it easier and easier to do that. Just for me though! So I'll keep including tags!
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