What are tags?

Tags are like keywords – they are a single word or short phrase that describes a contributed item and tells other people how you think about it. For example, one person may tag an early signed photograph of Kylie Minogue as ‘pop diva’, while another may tag it ‘Neighbours’ and ‘singer’, and yet another ‘my hero’. Someone might tag their grandfather’s first edition of The Pickwick Papers as ‘inheritance’, ‘Dickens’ and ‘bookbinding’, while another may tag the same book ‘literary’, ‘collectable’ or ‘London’.

Why add a tag?

There are two key reasons for adding tags to your contribution. Firstly, it’s all about making a connection with other people, and tapping into like-minded communities. People tag because they want to share their personal view of their object with others. They also hope they will find other people with similar items, interests, passions and idiosyncracies.

Secondly, tags help people make sense of things. In this website contributions are arranged by broad categories. Tags offer another more personal way of identifying and viewing items that have something in common. If you’re interested in pop divas, you may get new insights into what constitutes one. If you’re desperately seeking collectors of Madonna icons, you may well find a community of people who have collections to rival your own, with riches you have never come across before.

How do I add a tag?

It’s easy to add tags as part of the contribution process. It’s simply a matter of filling in a tag field when you first add your treasure to the website. When adding tags for your treasure think about its key characteristics, how you see it and how you want others to see it. You can add as many or as few as you like – whatever you think best describes your item. If you’d like to find out more about adding tags, see our step-by-step guide to contributing.

How do I see what tags people have used on this site?

When you look at individual treasures pages you’ll see the tags that people have written for their item. By clicking on a word or phrase you’ll be shown all the items which have the same tag.

You can also look at all the tags that have been added across the website by clicking view treasures by tags. You’ll see a list of tag words and phrases. Some tags in the list will be larger in size than others. This means that this tag is more popular than others - it has more items attached to it than the regular-sized tags. Clicking on each tag will show you all the items which have this tag attached to them.

Examples of tags

Anything can be a tag – the possibilities are endless:
Polaroids, apple, “My Granny”, “summer holidays”, blue, Japanese, “family heirloom”, religion, honeymoon, manuscript, “My bedroom”, atmosphere, craft, knitwit, immigrant, visitor, kitsch, scholar, King, conundrum…