Week 8: Folksonomies

I feel as though I missed a bit with last week’s relating theme of Social Bookmaking and Tagging because I went on blog holiday. I have been tagging articles to del.icio.us since the beginning of this term, inserting tags I found relevant to articles. It may be simple technology, but it took me a bit to realize that I could add any tag/keyword that I thought was relevant to articles I found. I guess I never thought of it in terms of classification. Only trained cataloguers are able to do that, right? Not anymore, I guess. I did feel empowered when I learned I could tag my own keywords onto pieces of writing. This week’s readings helped me to gain a better understanding of the implications of what people are doing when they tag. Social tagging has emerged as an inclusive bottom-up classification. It is a strong tool that should be of particular interest to information professionals as classification has traditionally been the sole domain of those in the field. As the development of folksonomy emerges, many issues arise that must be addressed from the perspective of those in the information field.

            With the advantages that folksonomy brings, there are also disadvantages. There are many terms referring to the same thing and so information on one topic cannot all be returned because the information can be tagged with different terms. There is little strength in social tagging in terms of accurate and precise information retrieval. As with any other technology or classification system, there are problems. The problem of deliberate nonsensical tags is a reality as can be seen by the Harry Potter example in the case study at the Ann Arbor District Library. Traditional classification methods have been criticized for being out-of-date, reflecting old fashioned, biased views of the cataloguer such as sexism and racism. Liz Lawely’s article shows that such biases can be seen in folksonomy as well.

People are able to apply current key terms on their own by the words they would normally use instead of having subject headings and keywords they would never normally use imposed on them. I agree with what was said in the readings about traditional classification systems still being required. The phenomenon of folksonomies does not mean that traditional methods of taxonomy should be done away with. Since folksonomy has emerged, serious consideration should go into how it can work with traditional classification methods.

I think that having social tags as supplements to library OPACs are a great idea. I like how the Blais Catalogue has incorporated tagging into their library system. They have something similar to the tag cloud, where the large and bolded words are the most popular. Used in this way, folksonomies are good points-of-access for subject headings and keywords. Information retrieval is stronger because libraries can connect people to information that would be more difficult to find.