Week Eight : Folksono-what?

Ah - I feel refreshed from my blog holiday, and ready to talk about folksonomies.  I think, as I assume I'm supposed to, that looking at folksonomies flows directly from the discussion of social tagging.  I started a Del.i.cious account at the start of the course, and have really enjoyed using it - especially as I browse websites at work and home - no more emailing myself long lists of links so they're "favourited" on my home PC too.

 But on to folksonomies (or ethnoclassification, as Peter Merholz would have it).  I'm not sure I really like either term, as a collection of tags (or plain language, or common terms) isn't really a classification system in the traditional sense, or in any formal way at all.  And that is not the intention of tags as I see it - though the potential for adapting tagging behaviour into library OPACS has really intrigued me.  I do like the idea of making information accessible by applying terms people actually use to talk about them - who actually knows all of the relevant LCSH terms and the order they should be in to return the best results?  This is a great leap forward for access to and findability of resources in libraries. 

However, despite the strengths of folksonomies, I still believe in established classification and it's uses in organizing a library's collection (though there are flaws with every system).  The assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of folksonomies was well represented in this week's readings, and many of the same points were made by each author.  I liked the analysis provided by Emanuele Quintarelli and Ellysa Kroski the best - mostly because they both had well-organized ideas (lists!), and I think they both spelled out the pros and cons in a clear, non-biased way even though they both support the idea of tagging and the usefulness of folksonomies.  I can see many of the strengths and weaknesses they identify with folksonomies being exposed when they are applied to library collections, especially if they are not moderated in some way (see the section on case studies coming up soon).  I am open to the idea of adding tagging functionality and other web 2.0 like collaborative tools to online catalogues, but like Liz Lawley, "I don't want to toss out controlled vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories.  I just don't believe that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified non-expert input."

That said, the tagging function in this week's case studies is seriously cool.  I would love to implement something similar at a public library - especially because it could be added incrementally, tested, removed if needed, and should be fairly easy with the LibraryThing widget.  It feels like a whole new frontier of OPACs - happening at the same time as some libraries are starting to embrace open source software for their OPACs (but that's a different discussion altogether).

I took Amanda's suggestion and searched for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at all 3 libraries that offered tagging in their catalogues (the University of Michigan's tags, though cool, crashed my IE browser several times, and they don't seem to have tagged this book yet).  I saw a lot of similarity among the 3 catalogues I did search - many of the tags I expected and some I didn't.  The most common tags (found in all 3 catalogues) were: fantasy, harry potter, rowling (or j.k. rowling).  Blais and Danbury had almost identical tag lists, and I wonder if there is a commonality between all libraries that use LibraryThing for Libraries that results in some consistency.  The tags at those two libraries also made the most sense to me.  Ann Arbor District Library's catalogue had some very interesting tags for this book, including: kill, death, nothing, and Do you control tags?.  The last one is intriguing to me - HP7 is the only book tagged with this phrase, and I wonder if it is tag spam of some kind, or someone goofing around?

I have altogether enjoyed learning more about tagging and folksonomies, and look forward to seeing how they change library OPACs and the organization of information online in the future.