Folksonomies: Thinking It Through
Folksonomy, like many topics in today's culture, is experiencing a rather dialectical debate (heavily for vs. heavily against). I enjoy hearing both sides of the debate but it worries me that there only seems to be two perspectives. Is there no middle ground? To second Rebekah's thought in her post last week on social bookmarking, is it all or nothing or can we find ways of combining aspects of different classification schemes to create a better overall system for users? The readings this week mainly seem to be reiterating past rhetoric on the subject without adding anything new. Yes, we know that folksonomies are more inclusive, reveal user behavior/preferences, engender community, are ambiguous, have precision and recall issues, etc., but so what? We need more information pertaining to how these benefits can be captured or disadvantages can be mitigated in practical use. Adam Mathes highlights some areas for further research at the end of his article and that's what's needed-new research. Our present case studies only show us examples of libraries that have implemented folksonomies into library functions/services without any analysis or evaluation of the outcome. Are tags in the catalogue actually helping users find material more easily? What are the outcomes of local tagging projects like PennTags and MTagger? Now that you have a collection of tags, are they of any use? How are they being used? How can they be used? Emanuele Quintarelli's article highlights an example of harnesssing the "common language" benefit of folksonomies to help create and access a corporate taxonomy. What we need is more people addressing the topic of folksonomies from a practical standpoint rather than a purely theoretical one. It would also help if people could try thinking outside of the two-sided box and approach the topic with a new perspective.
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Very interesting and
Very interesting and thought-provoking questions Helen. When I was going through the readings I found myself flip-flopping from side to side. I see the benefits yet at the same time I see the pitfalls. I totally agree with you that more research and hopefully the outcome of the research will lead us to a path somewhere in between the FOR and AGAINST sides. For myself - I'm not a tagger but after reading people's comments and thoughts and looking more closely at some of these case studies - I'm starting to waffle and am looking at incorporating tagging on a couple of my service sites. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Have a great week!
michelle
Hi Helen, I think the one or
Hi Helen,
I think the one or the other debate (folkosonomy vs hierarchy) is probably more in the internet side of things. Unless you’re a completely virtual library, you need to shelve the books somewhere. There was a whole debate before at one of my former workplaces on whether to abandon the advanced search feature on the website and just have a simple search, since so many people didn’t use the advanced search. One of the employee’s rationale for getting rid of it was that only the librarians use anyway.
The whole exchange went like this:
Employee A: Why do we even need an advanced search? People find it confusing. No one I know uses it.
Employee B (MLIS grad): But I always use the advance search option!
Employee C: That’s the point. Only the librarians use it!
The reality is though, we need to have both features available because serious searching requires more specificity.
But getting back on topic, I think the in-between right now between the two extreme forms of classification is the faceted classification thing.