Say what you will about evil-empire death merchants Raytheon - it turns out they are a great example of corporate web taggers!  David Weinberger points today to a fascinating wiki for the Taxonomy Community of Practice where there's a great article about Raytheon's practice of letting employees submit URLs with tags that company librarians quickly vet with an easy hand and then add to search results.  They love it!  Company librarian explains after the jump.
In the words of the dark librarian: "It is the single best thing we've done. I can't tell you how much we've spent on formal taxonomies, but suffice it to say that it's enough for me to wonder why I haven't gone into business for myself!

"Why does it work? Chiefly because the sites submitted are specific to a group or discipline, and no matter how hard we try, having a degree in library science does not give you a degree in engineering (insert discipline here). We do not speak their vernacular. We do well enough to add value with controlled terms, but these folk tags have a life of their own.

"These tags are a fantastic resource - user warrant - for keeping the controlled vocabularies up-to-date. They provide us feedback we could get no other way. Given the ease with which people can tag things – and yes, we could argue about whether there should be some cognitive burden for quality's sake - we gain a unique insight via this process."