“The strategy of tagging–free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints–seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.” – Clay Shirkey in Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.
The TeleRead take: The most clueful librarians are growing more and more open to the idea of users creating their own sharable categories of information for cataloging purposes. And Clay Shirkey, a consultant and professor specializing in interactivity on the Net, makes a powerful case for user-created tags, aka folksomonomies. One example he cites? The Library of Congress categories for history. Would you believe, all of Africa is lumped together, while the big European countries get their own classifications. Talk about the subjectivity of classifications and the temptation to impose one’s way on others! Maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence that a control freak like Mao was an actual librarian and J. Edgar Hoover was planning to become one.
Does this mean that all librarians are control freaks? Of course not. The very fact that librarians are growing excited over folksomonomies shows the folly of categorizing them all this way. As I see it, the best librarians are like the best editors or systems analysts or doctors. They seek to serve rather than control. Folksonomies can help.
(Thanks to Roger Sperberg for the Shirkey pointer.)
