Week 8: Folksonomies

Learning Objectives

By the end of this week, students will:

• understand the advantages and limitations of folksonomies & distributed classification.
• have explored the idea of communities of interest and practice.
• develop their own ideas on the possible applications of
  folksonomies and communities of interest/practice in the context of
  library service.

Readings

• The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, Ellysa Kroski
• Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, Adam Mathes
• Hierarchical Subject Relationships in Folksonomies, Sam H. Kome
• Folksonomies: power to the people, Emanuele Quintarelli
• White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification), Carol Ou
  
• Social Consequences of Social Tagging, Liz Lawley
• Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang (podcast)

Case Studies

Things to do this week

• Since the topic we're dealing with this week is more of an "issue" than a technology per se, the case studies are intended to provide a springboard for you to think about the idea of folksonomies as a point-of-access/information retrieval tool. Once you've read the articles and explored the case studies, post your thoughts & comments to your blog. Don't forget our weekly deadline for blogging is 9 am, Friday. Remember to check out your classmates' posts too and respond (where appropriate) in the comments.
• Continue tagging pertinent content in del.icio.us using the "lis9763" tag.