Tagging

Why Use Tags?

Tags allow you to find resources on particular topics through a search, but also serve to mark specific subsets of your bookmarks which you want to use in different situations. You might use a tag to identify the resources for a class reading list, for a research project, for a paper in preparation or for extra-curricular activities such as travel or events.

How to Use Tags

Enter all or part of a tag in the tags search field. The search does partial tag matching, so it is OK to enter a distinctive substring such as "trav" rather than "travel".

Tag search also works across other people's tags, allowing you to discover resources that other people have taged with predictable terms - for example, search for "history" or "map" or for widely used but more specialist terms such as "chronology" or "GIS".

How to Create Tags

Enter tags, separated by commas, in the tag field in the Private Info tab of the Edit page. Unlike many systems, multi-word tags are permitted. Do not enter commas in a tag, of course ...

If any of the tags you enter are not recognised, a disambiguation window will pop up when you try and save the record. This will suggest existing tags that you might have meant (to reduce the proliferation of tags through typos and punctuation differences - Heurist ignores capitalisation and spacing differences) and also allows you to edit the text of the new tags or omit them altogether. It then rewrites the tag string with the changes you have made.

In other places in the system, Heurist will display a pulldown list of all the tags you've used, allowing selection from the list. In the confiuration page, all your tags are displayed with frequency of use.

You can edit the text of a tag without detaching it from any bookmarks you have taged with it. So if you change "History" to "Historical Studies", all the bookmarks taged "History" will now be taged "Historical Studies".

Future Plans

Additional use of pulldown lists of existing tags to insert tags during editing and search. We don't currently do this everywhere to avoid cluttering up the screen. Sorting of tags by frequency of use will also be introduced as an option in pulldowns.

The configuration page allows deletion and editing of tags, but this will be extended with merging of tags, and made more easily accessible with a link wherever tags are used.