From: "Adam"
'Bruce,
'I'm worried that you're posing a bit of a false dichotomy with these posts, and also relying on a rather tired stereotype.
'Librarians as a whole aren't opposed to tagging systems, they're just a bit slow in implementing them. One reason is that long before Flickr and Del.icio.us, libraries tried out a somewhat similar mechanism called 'democratic indexing'(1), which didn't
turn out that great.
(((Because it was HERESY!!!)))
'Other reasons include the fact that libraries are overworked and
underfunded, but that's another already well-ground ax for me. (((Presumably del.icio.us no longer has this problem, after being ACQUIRED BY YAHOO!))) Anyway,
'Tagging isn't a new idea. In fact, many of the problems people are discovering with folksonomies – lack of control, lack of hierarchy, redundancy, inconsistency –are problems that pre-coordinate classification systems like Dewey and LC were designed to address in the first place. (((Those ain't bugs, them are features.)))
'I'm a software designer who became a librarian because I realized that the problems of managing huge amounts of digital information were not part of a new branch of computer science, but rather of a new branch of library science.
'I think the main failure of librarians so far, with regards to social tagging systems, has been in understanding that the sheer scale of the Web addresses many of the problems that uncontrolled indexing presents. It's the same Wikipedia principle–that a sufficiently large and networked crowd has unexpected advantages over a small group of experts–that *everyone* is having trouble wrapping their heads around these days, not just librarians.
I know you must get a lot of e-mails, so thanks for taking the time. (((It's okay man... I had fun reading it, I just DIDN"T KNOW WHERE TO FILE IT.)))
Adam
(1) "The Order of Catalogues - Towards Democratic Classification and Indexing in Public Libraries" (1997)
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla63/63albha.htm
