Week 8: Folksonomies, Democracy and User Service: the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship!

I guess I got a little ahead of myself with my blog last week.  Maybe it's my folklore background (combined with my overall love of the concept of tagging) that was getting ahead of me.  Needless to say, I seem to have talked about a bunch of stuff for this week in last week's blog.

In light of that, I thought that for this week I might leave the academics aside and write a little from the heart.  One thing I took from my Folklore degree was that sometimes (or oftentimes depending on the area of study) academics completely miss the boat when it comes to what "normal people" need and want (and, indeed, what "normal people" are about!).  Given that librarians are--in some way--"academic professionals", it's understandable that we may sometimes suffer from the academic pretensions.

I find the debate between traditional cataloguing and tagging to be a little alarmist, personally.  As I mentioned in this week's chat, I don't see either one taking the place of the other for a great while to come.  In an ideal library, I actually think we should use both.  Given the advanced cataloguing systems available today, there is no reason librarians cannot use controlled vocabulary in the "background" and more user-friendly "tags" for the front-end of our system.

Even as a fairly savvy searcher in my pre-LIS days, I will admit that I seldom used controlled vocabulary because I felt it was generally meaningless, until someone explained the meaning of it to me.  The average user just sees a series of words with seemingly random dashes and slashes separating the words and is apt to become disinterested in exploring them unless he/she understands the value of them.

As librarians, we talk a lot about user services and information literacy... so why are we still using cryptic classification systems on the front end?  By all means, we can do what we like internally--and we should--if we were to even try to use tagging as a method of classification, our collections would quickly become messes to put it nicely.  That said, how many users actually use or care about the MARC display?  There's no reason tagging will or should supersede, but it doesn't hurt to "pretty up" the information on the user's end.

For instance, while within our system, we can still have a book classified as Wars--Global--World War II (apologies for my likely incorrect classification structure there, I'm no cataloguer!) within our MARC record, but on the users end, they could access tags such as "war", "world war II", "the second world war" and "WWII", making the searching process much more natural for them with no noticeable impact on our own organizational schemes.  We can certainly see this sort of thing done within the catalogues in this week's case studies: it's not as though the controlled vocabulary has been thrown out altogether, it's simply had a change in focus for the front end system.

Maybe it's just the reference librarian or the libertarian in my talking, but I really do love the idea of user-editable tags for front-end "classification".  Certainly, there are drawbacks, such as the amount of "tag bloat" that can happen as well as inappropriate/irrelevant tags being propagated.  These problems can be addressed with software or human checking, however.  The important thing that I remember is that tags should be used as simply another searching method, rather than replacing controlled vocabulary or Boolean searching.  I think that the more options we offer to users, the better their library experience will be.

Ultimately, if we are going to argue that libraries are places that promote information literacy and democracy (as many librarians have), then we should make it readily available to all users, rather than making them have to "work" for it.  I guess for me, there's not really any competition between the librarian's needs and the users’ needs.  I've always considered librarianship to be a "service" profession--even on the cataloguing side--so if we can make a user's job easier without a huge amount of difficulty on our end (maybe it's just my perception that adding a mostly user-administered tagging system is relatively painless!), I think we really should go forward with it.