Chapter 1. What Is Tagging?

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A basic model of tagging systems

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Five different kinds of tagging systems

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Where tagging sits between personal information management, information architecture, and social software

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Walk into the public library in Danbury, Connecticut, and you’ll find the usual shelves stacked with books, organized into neat rows. Works of fiction are grouped alphabetically by the author’s last name. Nonfiction titles are placed into their proper Dewey Decimal categories just like they are at tens of thousands of other libraries in North America.

But visit the Danbury Library’s online catalog (http://danburylibrary.org ...

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