Reflections part 2

Flickr is definitely my favourite thing so far. I love the possibilities that arise from the interaction between word and text. And despite my doubting attitude to tagging, I have to say that I've been proved (a bit) wrong:

In my previous post I started to write some reflective material about Cam23 so far. I searched Flickr for keywords "reflection woman mirror", expecting to find pictures of a woman looking in a mirror. But then I fell in love with this photo of a woman and her reflection. And here's the thing: Library of Congress had allocated subject headings

Airplane industry
Women--Employment
World War, 1939-1945
Bombers
Drilling
United States--Tennessee--Nashville

but all the things I'd searched under were listed not in the LC headings but in the tags on the right hand side. Someone had the imagination to see that it was a picture of a woman's reflection in a mirror and tag it accordingly.

Tagging

I'm in two minds about this tagging idea. Asking a librarian to add independently generated keywords rather than controlled vocabulary goes against ingrained work habits. I'm not joking.

The screenshot shows what happens when you search Aquabrowser for books by the author Angela Brazil. it finds the books (among other things) but the tags generated (in the little cloud on the left) are a motley collection and generally not much use.