Categories = Audience

Tags = Description

LIS Website Team confession: As a team we’ve struggled with a way to articulate to everyone how and why we structured the categories on this blog in the way that we did, and how we intend categories and tags to be used. Hopefully this explanation will provide a useful distinction between the two, and give both post authors and blog readers guidance for how to use them.

Categories (Select your audience)

Use a category to reach an audience (or several).

We want people to subscribe via RSS to the categories they’re interested in. This will only work if post authors take a moment to categorize their posts for the intended audience.

Categories are reflective of LIS structure, including areas and teams, and the structure of Middlebury and its partner institutions. ★ The Essentials is intended to be the most outward-facing category. Use ★ The Essentials to reach both LIS and the outside world. Use a category like MIIS to categorize a post both for MIIS audience members, and if a post is substantially about MIIS.

Categories were predetermined by the LIS Webteam. The LIS Webteam reserves the right to change or add categories (pending team review and approval).

For more information on categories see the How do I…? page.

Tags (Identify and describe your post)

Use tags to identify the subject matter of your post.

Tags are intended to help readers locate more specific pieces of related content. Tags may be “cleaned up” or consolidated on occasion for clarity, but they are NOT predetermined by the LIS Webteam so please feel free to create your own, and use them liberally in your posts.

(Since it’s also possible to subscribe to tag feeds via RSS, they may also be considered audience selection to some extent.)

For more information on tags see the How do I…? page.

So remember:

Categories = Audience

Tags = Description

Also: A video on subscribing via RSS, from CommonCraft.

Happy posting and reading!

-The LIS Website Team

Rational – it can be confusing to use the current categories. See what is categorized currently as essential and what is not.

Some suggestions:

1) *The Essentials is not needed. All readers should subscribe to the whole blog and pick what they’re interested in cp. reading sections of newspapers or subscribing to any other blog.

2) or should the default category just be changed to “Areas and Workgroups” i.e. LIS centric with action required to categorize as “*The Essentials”

3) and/or should “*The Essentials” be renamed “*The Essentials (all campus)”

External Audience - term used TBD by vote by Fri 9/18 at 5 pm

Areas and Workgroups - use name of area as the category and use functions of the work area as tags (audience is mostly internal)

* Academic Consulting Services – research support, instruction, liaison
* Collection Management – aquire, catalog, preserve, maintain resources
* Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure – programming, systems, reporting, network
* LIS Administration – budget, planing, policy, assessment, strategy
* User Services – technology help and support, borrowing and lending, computing support, computing labs, media and event support

Institutions
* Middlebury
* MIIS
* Language Schools
* Schools Abroad
* Bread Loaf School of English
* Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
* MMLA

Teams
* Area Directors
* Curricular Technology
* Digitization
* LIS Website