Tag, You're It!

Wow, this week has really hit home for me...I had started writing an epic blog posting when I accidently hit the "delete!" button and lost the whole thing!!  I'll try to shorten what I originally had, since it really was quite long!  Like I said, this week's topic is really interesting for me, and I didn't realize it would be until I did the readings and looked at some of the blogs from everyone else.  Lee Rainie's article really jump-started my thinking for this week.

So here's the story: for my co-op, I'm a map cataloguer for Library and Archives Canada.  I've done descriptive work, but lately I've been working with Dewey Decimal, LCSH, and creating authority records.  I'm working with controlled headings and classification every single day, but reading the articles for the week makes me think (not for the first time!) if librarians - particularly cataloguers - are necessary.  We spend all of our time creating rules and standards that even we do not always perfectly execute.  I can't tell you how many ways I've seen the heading "Canada--Maps" written out ("canada--Maps", "Canada--maps", "canada--maps", "Canada--Maps.", and so on into infinity!) when there's only one way it should be done.  That's just one example out of thousands, meaning there are lonely records out there with these one-of-a-kind headings that can't be found when you use the proper heading (this isn't really a problem within an organization, it's when records are shared in a giant catalogue between many organizations, like on OCLC's WorldCat).  It makes me wonder how useful controlled headings/vocabulary is, especially, as Greg pointed out, many patrons don't know about these headings anyway.  I think this is why keyword searching is so popular: patrons don't know the controlled headings, so they type in what they're looking for, and get frustrated because (perhaps without knowing it) they haven't found the right words to describe what they're looking for.  So they turn to things like Google where you can type in almost anything and would probably find the information you need.

BUT:

Tags are an interesting attempt to control the uncontrolled.  We assign any words we choose to describe our item, and share it with everyone else on something like del.icio.us.  The problem is, though, that if no one thinks of the words you used, it won't be meaningful to anyone BUT you.  Think of our own "lis9763" tag: sure, we can all find our items, but no one else interested in social networking articles would ever dream to use that tag and thus won't find our items unless they exist elsewhere on the site with other tags (which makes me wonder: do the same items exist over and over again on del.icio.us with different tags assigned each time, something that can easily happen in a library catalogue where multiple copies of the same item could have different headings assigned to it?).  I see the benefits for us as a particular group, but if we'd like to share our items with the world at large we need new tags!  Even look at the tags on our website: "about me", "hi", "Intro", "introduction" and "introductions" probably all refer to week one posts.  I don't know how practical it is to have at least 5 tags for roughly the same kinds of items!  Perhaps this makes things more interesting from a social perspective and observing how people really understand themselves in relation to the online world, but the cataloguer in me is truly perplexed!  I would love to see wider use of nutr.itio.us as mentioned by Hollenback since it would help standardize the tags.

Isn't it ironic that there is frustration at library catalogs, the ultimate organization machines (barring human error!), leading to a use of keywords, but ultimately people still try to organize their information anyway with things like nutr.itio.us and categories (like on Wikipedia)?

I think what I'm really trying to do here is to justify my role in the world: a cataloguer's job, as I am discovering, is immensely difficult.  We try our best to control our headings and descriptions, but sometimes it's for naught.  Perhaps we should take a more balanced approach, as Andrea Mercado suggests, and still do the work of cataloguers but use social bookmarking to assign supplemental metadata to help our patrons even more.  This may be the best approach.

Thanks for sticking until the end!  This has truly been on my mind all day and I hope it ended up making sense, because it still turned out to be epic!