Maybe a good litmus test to see how hip your institution’s researchers are, you can see what tags have been assigned by researchers at your institution: 
Disclaimer – there are NO tags currently from my institution – this is actually a shot of the PUBLIC tags currently in the EV system.
Neat stuff – makes me wish this was in my discipline, but I’m never in this product…
From the press release that alerted me to this goodness:
“Records from engineering research databases including Compendex® and Inspec® and patents databases can be tagged by Engineering Village users. Users establish their own tags based upon what they find meaningful about a document. Documents can then be retrieved by searching for specific tags or sets of tags.
Tagging facilitates a user’s ability to share meaningful content. Users will assign tags to documents and can choose to make those tags accessible to colleagues, peer groups and even to all the users in the Engineering Village community. Users may also opt to keep tags private for personal use.
“While tagging is often considered a Web 2.0 phenomenon, it is incredibly well suited for a professional quality information service like Engineering Village” said Rafael Sidi, Vice President of Product Development, Ei. “Engineering Village databases have traditionally relied upon records being classified by experts using structured indexes. Now, by adding record tagging the power to classify records and create content has been extended to our users. Users can now tag records based on how they define a record’s relevance and importance . By choosing to expose those tags, Engineering Village users’ community is provided with a powerful way to identify engineering content other users find meaningful.”
Technorati Tags: Engineering_Village, Tagging
Comments
One response to “Engineering Village does tagging”
I use Compendex quite a lot (we are a heavy aerospace engineering school), and I could see how this would be very useful to our patrons. However, I’m wondering if engineers/students are actually going to use it (we have no tags yet either). I was excited when Ei added the RSS feed feature a couple of years ago, but no one seemed to be that interested in it because it took extra time to set up. Tagging adds so much value, but will the users feel that the value outweighs the extra time it will take to tag things? Especially when they have several hundred citations to browse through? Maybe it just needs a good marketing plan…