Folksonomies Revelation
Friday, December 16, 2005
I have had several things in mind to talk about but time and energy have been rare commodities recently.
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging is an excellent overview of the pros and cons of folksonomy organization. They’ve proven to be useful and popular with communities on the Internet, including the librarian community.
But I have to reveal a deep, dark secret. I don’t use tags. I don’t tag my own content and I don’t use them to find other people’s content. First wikis, now this. I may have to turn in my geek license. (Note: I have been extremely impressed with St. Joseph County Public Library’s use of a wiki for managing their subject guides. My library also hosts a number that are edited by different people with no html skills. I can easily see them just clicking an edit button and working away.)
Maybe I drank too much library kool-aid. Maybe I just think too much like a computer. But when I’m browsing a website, I naturally head to the formal categories. So I’ve been ambivelent about integrating tags into library websites. It’s very Library 2.0 and even useful to many (most?) people. But it doesn’t always work. Does it mean I have to give up my beloved subject headings? Authority-controlled classification of content is one of the basic parts of librarianship, one that should remain even into Library 3.0. People come to us not just for information, but for reliable information.
And then there was my revelation. No. We can keep both subject headings and add tags. Like keyword searching they can be used for casual information seeking. But if that doesn’t work or a more in-depth search is needed, the precision of subject headings will still be there. So I’m probably the last one to figure this out. So now I’m headed over to John Blyberg’s to see what he has on tag clouds for the catalog. 
Web Tools — laura
December 20th, 2005 at 10:57 am
I guess one of the differences between folksonomy and the formal methods of categorization you refer to are that folksonomies, while selfish, allow others to potentially find what they do not even realize they are looking for - items in the long tail. I’ve talked about my own understanding of folksonomies here.