Exploring Folksonomies before midnight October 25, 2006
It’s a race to the finish! See how far I make it through the readings before midnight!
The Kroski article is a good summary of the Pros and Cons of folksonomies, but the most important message, I feel, is that “resistance is futile”! The web is so large and ever-changing that paying professionals to classify it all is just impossible - folksonomies are “better-than-nothing” so we’d better get used to it and stay on top of this technology.
The Wikipedia article seems to me like a good place to start when convincing a company/organization to take up the practice of tagging. In a special library environment tagging would be very useful since the corporation/organization would consist of specialized professionals who would share similar vocabularies and interests. If you want to classify all of the organization’s documents for database retrieval you could therefore depend on the creators to tag their items (and future readers to fix the tags), towards what this article calls an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”. The Quintarelli article was an excellent choice for me to read next since it explains the best way to supplement enterprise tagging: “In the direction of facing the intrinsic precision loss of folksonomies, Jess McMullin proposes to complement social classification with other classification approaches: «automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed [see Google Suggest and Ajax technology], mapping ad-hoc tags to structured facets, and top-down classification oversight by information professionals».” Great idea!
The Kome study finds that hierarchical relationships exist in folksonomies. Perhaps I am tired, or perhaps my brain is full, but either way this librarian-speak isn’t getting through to me right now. Could anyone help me out and let me know what the bottom line is for libraries and folksonomies? My impression so far is that the fact that hierarchical relationships exist means good things for tagging… I am sure I am missing something deep here.
Oh no! my phone rang. I will have to continue this later…
I found your comment on special libraries using tagging to be extremely helpful. I don’t know why but I always seem to focus on whether these social networking tools can be used in an academic or public library (and often come up against a brick wall).
Thanks
I think you couldn’t be more on the money when you say that “resistance is futile” and “the web is so large and ever-changin that paying professionals to classify it all is just impossible - folksonomies are “better-than-nothing” so we’d better get used to it and stay on top of this technology”. I keep repeating myself as I post my replies, but once again, folksonomies and controlled vocabularies each have their merits and downfalls, and as you say folksonmies are becomming more and more accepted and widely used, so instead of debating what is better, shouldn’t we try to find a happy medium and take the best of both worlds and find a happy place?
Hi Heather - I, too, agree that it’s pretty much futile to resist folksonomies. So, if we decide that controlled vocabulary and tags should co-exist, how do we go about making that happen in our libraries? This is where I get stuck a little. Tagging in the catalogue seems to make the most sense, but I have a feeling that we’re most of us are far from having the technical abilities to make this a reality in our OPACs. And, while tagging in the OPAC *sounds* like a great idea, it really only works when you reach critical mass - i.e.: many/most of your users tag catalogue records. And, if you’re a small-ish library, can you hope to reach critical mass? Probably not. So, can we start aggregating tags across OPACs? Is this something WorldCat should be doing? (they’ve already jumped on the user-generated content bandwagon with thier implementation of book reviews. Which has fallen flat, unfortunately).
No answers, just more questions to think about!