You are hereBlogs / dillon's blog / Week 8: Folksonomies
Week 8: Folksonomies
My first thought this week is that Kroski's
article is amazing. As I was reading through the positive points about folksonomies and tagging, I kept thinking, "Yes, but...", and then when I got to the latter part of the piece, most of my objections were accounted for.
I find folksonomies very useful for browsing, or discovering linked materials that I otherwise might not have thought of, but as some of the articles this week mentioned, folksonomies aren't necessarily an ideal replacement for controlled taxonomies.
A problem that Social
Consequences of Social Tagging centres around is that social tagging hits the wall when people just don't want to tag your material for free. Popular books, movies, photos, etc., might have no problem gaining tags, but what about material that is interesting to a very small portion of the population - can we count on their willingness to tag?
Blais
Catalog - The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges and Danbury
Library Catalog - I like the use of LibraryThing, because the use of an
existing, common set of tags means that the users at Blais and Danbury don't
have to start everything from scratch.
Catalog
| Ann Arbor District Library - The tagging is nice to have, but I wonder
how long it will take to gain popularity. When I searched for "The Da
Vinci Code", it still had no tags.
LibraryThing
for Libraries - I've just started using LibraryThing, and I can see the
potential. A large community of taggers has a greater potential to produce
useful tags than a relatively small library user community.
UM Library:
MTagger - Judging from the size of the tags, feminism and manga are really
popular at the University of Michigan, but aside from DVD's, everything else
just fades into the background. I would guess that greater participation would
increase the number of big tags.
- dillon's blog
- Login to post comments
Hi Dillon,
I took this week as a blog holiday so have not done the readings, but I thought I would read through some of the class's posts to get a brief overview of the topic.
I really liked how you reviewed and compared some of the Library web sites' uses of folksonomies from the case studies. I was surprised that the Tagging at Ann Arbor District Library wasn't really taking off, as they seem to be at the forefront of web 2.0 tool implementation. Searching for 'The Da Vinci Code' was a good way to really test it....as an interesting aside, I did a search for the most recent Harry Potter; it had a lot of tags but many of them seemed arbitrary:
harrypotter, 21july2007, fantasy, voldemort, HarryPotter!, Harry Potter, kill, death, rowling, 7, final, last, magic, deathly, hallows, nothing, Do you control tags?
Thanks for the post!
Hey Dillon,
I agree that taggin in library catalogues are going to be of the material that is most popular. This isn't that big of a deal, but I think librarians should be monitoring tags frequently so they can perhaps add on and provide links to books that users might not know about or perhaps associate with. Users I think are more willing to tag and use folksonomies on the web because it is for their own reference.