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Frequently Asked Questions
About MTagger
MTagger is the U-M Library's tagging tool -- it allows you to save and label things you find on library web pages, the library catalog (Mirlyn), digital images, or any other web page.
How does it work? You "tag" an item by typing a few words or phrases that will help you categorize the page. You can think of a tag as a label to help you find that web page again. You may choose to give a web page several tags that describe the content of the page. Later, when you want to return to that page again, you can look for pages that you've tagged accordingly. You could tag books in Mirlyn and web pages with a course number to bring together all your research materials for a class (phil389, for Philosophy 389, for example).
You could tag web pages, images, and books with a keyword to see all of them at once (see books in the catalog, digital images, and web pages tagged Russia). Working on a group project? You and your fellow students can tag resources for the project across the library web site so you can all find and share them.
You can also find things that other people have given the same tag, and see all the tags other users have applied to the web page you saved. When you tag an item (a web page), you are also helping other library users find that resource.
What is a 'Tag'?
A tag is a label that you assign to a web page. They are keyword descriptors that help you and other users find similar library items. Most importantly, tags are chosen by you. You can assign as many tags to an item as you like and rename or delete the tags later. Like bookmarks or favorites in your web browser, tags let you collect and organize web pages you want to return to. Unlike bookmarks or favorites, tags are accessible from any computer with an internet connection. If you've ever typed keywords into Flickr or YouTube, labeled friends in a picture on Facebook, or used Gmail labels to organize your email, you've tagged something!What are collections?
Unlike other tagging tools, MTagger assigns every tagged item to a "Collection". A collection is a way to focus your search for tagged items by looking only at items from the library catalog, or from our digital image collections, or from library web pages.
What's an item?
Essentially, an item is a webpage. There are many different types of items within the library. A few examples are books, catalog records, webpages, and images.
Who can tag?
If you are affiliated with the University of Michigan and have a uniqname, you can tag thing with MTagger. This includes people with guest accounts.
If you don't already have a University of Michigan uniqname, you can set up a friend account and add MTags. (Note that friend accounts do not give you any other access to University Library services that you would not have without logging in.)
Anyone can view tag clouds, click on tag, use the search functions in MTagger, and subscribe to RSS feeds -- no login is required for anything but adding tags.
What can be tagged?
MTagger is built in to the following collections:
- MLibrary: Library web pages.
- Mirlyn: Individual items in Mirlyn, the library catalog.
- Image Class: Digital images provided by the library.
- SPO: Electronic journals published by SPO, the Scholarly Publishing Office.
- Other: Any webpage on the internet using the MTagger Browser Bookmark that you can add to your browser.
We plan to add new collections in the coming months, including:
- Deep Blue: Items in Deep Blue, U-M's institutional repository
- MBooks: Books digitized through MBooks, the Michigan Digitization Project
- Citations: Citations of articles via MGet It, the citation linker
The MTagger Browser Bookmark can be used to tag pages anywhere on the web.
Drag me to your Bookmarks Bar to quickly MTag any page on the web!
Who can see my tags?
Anyone can, whether or not they are affiliated with the University of Michigan. Tags are searchable from Internet search engines such as Google. If you tag items using MTagger, your uniqname and the web pages you tag will be visible to other users. MTagger stores and displays your uniqname, the URLs of pages you have tagged, and the tags you have applied to items. You do not need to tag anything to see other users' tags and items descriptions.
NOTE: As an option in "Manage Your Tags," you may choose to tag anonymously. This means that your items and tags will be displayed to other users, but your uniqname will be hidden. But tags are meant to be shared -- so join in!
