We have a collection here at Ryde which consists of Chinese books that have been donated to the library. Because they are a bit of a mixed bag with regard to quality and content, they all get grouped under the title "Chinese donation", saving on time and expense in cataloguing them properly. A problem arises when someone takes a liking to a particular book and wants to know if we have any more titles similar to it in our collection. Unfortunately we have no way of searching the donation collection through keywords, title or author.
This is where user-generated (or even library staff-generated) tags could come in handy. By tagging a book with a keyword it would make finding similar books a lot easier. Obviously you then get problems of people using inappropriate or irrelevant tags, but this would be a small price to pay to have books searchable, and the tags could be checked on occasion by staff.
Just a thought...
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