• Your tag should be 6-12 characters in length and contain only letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9), e.g. “fedorazon”
• The tag should be a single “word”, no spaces should be in the tag.  Though you are welcome to compound words into a single word, e.g. “crm4uni”
• No special characters should be included in the tag, i.e. no dashes (-), underscores (_), full stops / periods (.), commas (,) or any other character you’d have to press in combination with the “shift” key on your keyboard to create.  Just stick with single “word” combinations of A-Z and 0-9.

• Use your tag on Web 2 Tools like: WordPress, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter (via hash symbol “#”, Technorati and (last but not least) delicious.
• Use your tag with your code repository like: GoogleCode, GitHub, Sourceforge, etc.
• Use your tag on word documents (2007/10) when you save the document there are boxes for both ‘author’ and ‘tags’ prior to clicking ‘save’
• Use your tag in the subject heading of all emails to your programme manager, this is especially helpful so your programme manager can keep track of correspodance with the various project participants.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• Q: When should I create a tag? / A: Ideally you should create a tag during bid writing stage (or even earlier if you are building on an idea <- never hurts to tag up an idea at a Eureka moment for your own notes).  Most importantly for a project you should make sure that everyone knows the tag and agrees that it is a single unique tag.  The team should be refering to the project via that tag prior to the bid being submitted and should not change once the bid is funded.
• Q: Won’t this tag get lost as more tags are added to the internet? / A: Potentially yes, but ideally we will have archived your content into our archive before that happens so that the data will be a coherent collection that others will be able to use in the future.
• Q: Why is a tag for every project important to JISC? / A: By all projects having a tag we are able to start doing more quantitative analysis of data, for example text mining on various collections of projects.  If we fund several technical projects we can text mine the data produced by those projects to get an idea of what technologies are being regularly used or what is cutting edge.  This helps inform us on what kind of training events we should be putting on or what new innovation spaces we should be exploring.
• Q: When I tags then in twitter I use the hash or pound symbol (#) to tag tweets, do I always have to use the “#” symbol with my tag? / A: No you do not need to use the hash symbol for other tagging tools.  Though for twitter it is a good idea as it also enables you to set up a twitter archive (like Twapper Keeper) where you can then have your tweets saved beyond the two weeks that twitter keeps tweets!
• Q: What if the online Web application I am using doesn’t have a tagging system, how can I tag content? / A: You can set up a delicious account which enables you to tag any page with a URL of it’s own.
• Q: What if I am confused and don’t understand tags? / A: Contact your friendly neighborhood Programme Manager who is just a phone call or skype away 🙂
• Q: What if my question is not addressed above? / Please post your question in the comments section and we’ll get back within a day or two to answer it, otherwise please don’t hesitate to email us.

**JISC is also using tags internally to organise the projects into sets or themes of projects which we call “strands” and “programmes”.  For example we have sets of projects organised via strand like jiscRI, vreRI, jiscEXPO, jiscDEPO, jiscLMS, etc. and we organise those strands into programme tags such as “INF11”.  Each team in JISC will have a Programme of work, so tags are a good way for you to get an overview of JISC work as well.  These tags also help us do our job better by undertaking project support activities like programme evaluation, synthesis and benefits realisation work (as defined by our “Managing Successful Programmes” methodology).