Handling story metadata

Hi all,

We have a unique situation at the Columbia Missourian which is that we have students cycle in and out of our newsroom three times a year (gotta love a teaching newspaper). We're trying to get better with story metadata, specifically to help out our archives (in Merlin) to be more searchable.

I'm wondering if anyone has implemented any sort of metadata/tag list suggestion function in their systems (note, I'm talking about something different than the suggestions from Open Calais or the Content Exchange) -- along the lines of suggested metadata that would be internal to a newsroom. e.g. "Columbia police department" or, say, the mayor's or a public official's name. The idea would be to provide a list of frequently used local tags to help newbies know what to add to stories.