What are tags?

Tags are words or phrases that you can add to items to help you organise and remember them. Your tags are visible to other users, and their tags are visible to you. You can add up to 20 tags per item. Before you add tags you should read the Terms of Use for this feature.

Viewing tags

Tags added to an item can be displayed as a 'cloud' or a list. A tag cloud is an alphabetical list of tags where the size of the text reflects the popularity of the tag. The more items assigned to a tag, the bigger that tag appears in the cloud. A tag list shows tags arranged in order of popularity, so that the most frequently used tag appears at the top of the list.  Only the seven most recent tags will be displayed in the List view. The number of items assigned to each tag appears in brackets to the right of the tag. Click a tag to search for all items that have been assigned the tag.

Adding and removing tags

Adding a tag to an item

To add a tag to an item, type the name of the tag in the 'Enter tags' box, then click Save.  You can add up to 20 tags depending upon whether you are using single words or phrases. Tags can only contain letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores and apostrophes. Tags cannot contain any other special characters  or be longer than 35 characters (including spaces).

All the tags that other people have used for the item appear in the right-hand column, and all the tags you have used before on all your tagged items appear in the left-hand column. You can also select any of these tags to add to an item by ticking the check box beside each tag you want to use and clicking Save.

Adding more tags

You can add more tags but you must ensure that ALL the tags you want to appear are still in the box before you click Save.

Removing tags

All the tags you have added to an item will appear with a tick in the checkboxes under either Tags I have used before on all my tagged items as well as Tags other people have used for this item. To remove any of these tags uncheck the box to remove the tick and click Save. This does not remove other people's tags from appearing against an item.

Searching by tag

You can search for a tag to see if any items have been assigned a particular tag. You can also find items by browsing the tags that have been added by all Library users. You can browse by most recently added tags, or by most frequently added tags.