LIS 9763

 
            In her book “Social Software in Libraries,” Meredith Farkas notes that social bookmarking tools and tagging alleviate the “tyranny of choice” issue that preceded these online tools (125). Of course this issue still exists even with the adoption of social software and folksonomies. It is impossible to evade this issue when you are “archiving” (creating a personal library) the web. Melville Dewey created a classification system that attempted to organize the world’s knowledge. As noted in the readings and by various critics, Dewey’s classification as well as LCC has its flaws. It seems though that we are at a crossroads: the same crossroad that Melville Dewey was in the 1800s. We are questioning how to classify information or knowledge. Our information or knowledge, unlike Dewey’s, is online but the underlying issues of classification are relatively the same (except for the fact that online classification is primarily user-generated). I am leaning towards an analysis of folksonomies rather than social bookmarking or tagging, but they go hand-in-hand. With librarianship ingrained in my overall thinking, I am inclined to criticize folksonomies but it seems that user-generated classification is the only thing, at the present time, which will dethrone the “tyranny of choice.”  
            In her blog posting, Michelle argues that tagging is not necessarily conducive to the academic environment. The University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania might disagree with her comment.[1] Both of these universities have implemented tagging options in their catalogue and provide tagging software for organizing online content. For the past seven months, I’ve been immersed in an academic library. Confronted with user needs on a daily basis, I am inclined to support social bookmarking and tagging in the academic environment. Undergraduate students are so overwhelmed by the “tyranny of choice” and the complexity of Boolean or controlled searching. Most of the time they do not even know how to find a database in the catalogue, sift through results or perform complex searches. Thus, I think that tags based on specific subjects, assignments and courses would be absolutely fabulous! As I’ve noted in earlier blogs, I am weary of the undergraduates’ ability to evaluate information. So, the tags they do assign may not be appropriate. However, students need a starting place, and databases are daunting.  Also, if undergraduates pursue graduate work they have laid the foundation for future research by collecting and organizing relevant links. Thus, I think that academic social bookmarking tools (similar to Connotea) for students are a viable option.
            David Weinberger argues that “tagging let us organize the Net our way.” (qtd. In Rainie 5).  I think that examining tags can reveal a lot about our users. It would be interesting to examine the prominent tags in PennTags because this might reflect the primary assignments or research areas of a given university. Thus, allowing librarians to collect relevant materials based on the popularity of certain resources. It would also be interesting to consider how tagging has change information seeking behaviour (Has anyone found any studies or papers on this subject? I need to check DeliciousJ ). Overall, I think that examining library generated tagging systems and the prominent tags within can provide librarians with an inside look at their community base.
            I was also wondering why there cannot be a hybrid of controlled vocabulary and folksonomies. I can see this being a possibility in catalogues and databases. Perhaps, I am too forward thinking but nothing says that controlled vocabulary and folksonomies cannot coincide. Obviously this would not be possible on the web because it would be an astronomical task to classify all online content. Again, I am straying from the topic at hand. Regardless, I support tagging. In general, tagging software is not always intuitive (as Michelle also mentioned) but implementing tagging options into databases and catalogues might be very practical.
           
Farkas, Meredith. Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication
   and Community Online. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 2007.
 
Rainie, Lee. “28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content Forget
   Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users are Revolutionizing the Way We
   Classify Information – and Make Sense of It.” Pew Internet and American Life Project.   
   (2007) 21 Feb. 2009 < http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf>.

[1] Please see the Access Conference 2008 website, hosted by McMaster, for a copy of Ken Varnum’s presentation, entitled: “Tag! You’re It” on the social bookmarking initiative implemented by the University of Michigan Library (http://access2008.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/program/).