It has been a long time since I last contributed to the Libraries Interact blog. In that time I’ve changed jobs a number of times and I am now working as a Senior Software Engineer for the Serval Project. The goal of the Serval Project is to write software that supports communication in the absence of mobile phone towers and other supporting infrastructure. Perhaps due to damage, flooding / fire etc, or where the traditional telecommunications providers don’t have sufficient economic incentive to invest in an area.

A presentation by our Co-Founder and Lead Researcher, Dr Paul Gardner Stephen talking about our project and goals is available on YouTube.

My main area of focus is on the Serval Maps application. The goal of the Serval Maps application is to provide a platform for collaborative mapping on Android powered mobile phones using the network powered by the Serval Mesh software.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Libraries Interact and that is a good question.

You see I’ve started looking at the metadata that I can add to a Point of Interest, POI, on the map. At its core a POI is a marker on the map with a title and description. For example in the context of a disaster the POI may be that a bridge is out, a building has fallen down. Alternatively in the context of a research project the POI may be the number of frogs in an area, or the size of a cactus infestation in a national park.

A requested feature for POIs is to implement categories. A list of categories would make it easier to find similar POIs. The main issue with a list of categories is that they are a form of taxonomy and a taxonomy is built on the assumption that centralised control and authority is available.

In contrast a folksonomy is built around the use of tags and is an example of users collaboratively working together to build a list of common agreed upon tags that can be used for categorisation of content. For this reason using tags as an additional piece of metadata associated with a POI makes sense.

Once I started thinking about taxonomies, folksonomies, tags and categories I immediately thought of librarians and which led me to think about Libraries Interact.

This post is to ask the collective group of librarians, who visit Libraries Interact, for some help in answering a question I have.

The question is this:

From a UX (user experience) perspective which is better, single word tags (a space delimited list) or multi word tags (a comma delimited list). To help answer this question I created a poll and post on my personal blog.

I’d appreciate it if the Libraries Interact collective could take a moment to respond to the poll and let me know any other thoughts they may have either in the comments here, or over on my personal blog. It would be a great help in furthering the development of our open source software.