Competitive indexing!

Why not? There's competitive eating, after all. I've just spent two days teaching (for the 3,746th time, at least) the benefits of using Library of Congress Subject Headings when searching the online catalog. Of course, I always wonder how to make these lessons more interesting and compelling. Then I opened up the new issue of School Library Journal and found this article about a game involving the use of tags (or subjects) that users have attached to their images on Flickr, "the popular photo-sharing program that allows members to post their pics to the world." The game is called Fastr and loads 10 images that share a common tag. The images come up one at a time at 4-second intervals. The faster you are at guessing the correct tag, the more points you get.

Let me tell you, it's brutal. After a solid 15 minutes of play I accrued maybe 27 points. Compare that to Zargoth, who racked up 1,776 points on Sunday. One thing this experience tells me is that assigning a subject heading like "cookery" to cookbooks is no stranger than the way many Flickr users classify their photos. It's amazing what people will label with tags like "Einstein," or "pirate," or "dots." (Or maybe it's just amazing how many people have dogs they've named "Einstein").