Are folksonomies really the better way?

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I’m thoroughly enjoying conversations with my mentee @ the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He is very familiar with Web 2.0 and so naturally we have already begun a dialog about the viability of the library side of this technology trend, known as Library 2.0. I have made clear my doubts and dislikes about both the term and the movement before this. But my thoughts and views are still evolving and I am still coming to grips with some of the implications for libraries of new stuff like folksonomies. The folksonomies part of Library 2.0 in particular seems to stick in my head, maybe because I have a strong background in cataloging in academic libraries.

Below is something I wrote to my mentee in response to some points about folksonomies and I include it here simply to demonstrate or expose my line of thought. As I noted to my mentee, if I am way off base here, please take me up on it. At least feel free to challenge whatever I’ve written. After thinking about this further, I am wondering if I’m pursuing this from a logical point of view as an “either/or” situation. (Taxonomies or folksonomies.) Instead I think it is really, or will really be, a “both/and” situation.

The one thing that I still have a problem with (not with you, or what you wrote) is … and I struggle to figure out what the right words are to describe this … the ignorance of the past in libraries, even of the recent past. I understand that this is natural among those who style themselves as revolutionaries as they try to get the library community to break free of tradition and the “this is how we’ve always done it” inertia that is so prevalent. It’s not just that the past is dismissed, but that it seems — to me — to be dismissed without any awareness of or concern for the heart of WHY things are or were the way they are/were. That libraries have always striven for user interaction. Even in what some might describe as the hardest case scenario, that of the library (card) catalog, any library worth its salt pays attention to user’s needs and has updated catalog records with subject headings or subject keywords that help meet a user’s needs at his or her request. No, this is not the same as the user him/herself updating the record, I realize that. But this idea of the user having no input into the catalog is an over generalization.

What today we call folksonomies has or can have been implemented in library catalogs. It’s just that that was not how libraries or librarians felt was the best way to organize information. And I am not so sure that folksonomies and tagging and giving the power to the user really is the best way to organize information. Sure, I understand tag clouds, and I understand that there are cool ways via complicated algorithms (e.g. in LibraryThing) to auto categorize item A that’s been tagged one way with item B that’s tagged in a different way. But I have yet to see any concrete, systematic evidence that this is a better way of organizing information broadly (not just within a small user community or for one individual user). We are largely going on a premise here. As you say there will likely spring up (if there hasn’t been already) a surge of research in library journals about this very thing.

My point here is that the very basis of why we cataloged things the way we did was to serve the user, not to hinder any access. It’s a different side of the coin that many people who are excited about the library/web 2.0 stuff just don’t seem willing to accept, in part at least because they have no real idea of the foundations of modern cataloging practice.

Maybe I’m really building a straw man argument here. And I certainly have a struggle to articulate these thoughts. But take them as they are and if I’m not making sense or my points aren’t really valid, take me up on it.

  • http://walt.lishost.org <![CDATA[Walt]]>

    “After thinking about this further, I am wondering if I’m pursuing this from a logical point of view as an “either/or” situation. (Taxonomies or folksonomies.) Instead I think it is really, or will really be, a “both/and” situation.”

    That’s certainly the conclusion I arrived at:
    http://cites.boisestate.edu/v6i4a.htm

  • <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Thanks, Walt. I have to admit to not having read your article on this topic very closely, and I should have. I think “balance” is the word that best describes this approach. It often seems like that is where I come down on an issue. ‘Course that could be termed “wishy washy” but, whatever. I was thinking more about this the other day as I rode on the train on my home and realized, hey, trains are definitely “old” technology (invented, what, in the late 1700s?), yet they readily fill an important niche in the world of mass transportation to this very day, coexisting peacefully with much newer technology such as cars, buses, and airplanes. Radio has not died out because of TV. And so forth. I think these analogies when pressed may have flaws but they are illustrative. The diversification in the way people find information (that has always been there) is just continuing to expand.

  • http://www.librarything.com <![CDATA[Tim Spalding]]>

    I hope you’ll forgive a long-ish reaction.

    I think Web 2.0 boosters—I am excluding myself—too often pretend to a superiority over “traditional cataloging” that is under-informed an unearned. The web is, of course, full of boosterism and ignorance, and the din of this can, I imagine, set a librarian’s teeth on edge.

    But these tendencies are hardly restricted to the worst stuff. Take, for example, Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated,” in my mind the most intelligent and persuasive argument for tagging against “traditional” classification. About half the talk is devoted to the shortcomings of the Dewey Decimal and LC Call Number systems: They are limited to one subject because a book can only live one place on a shelf; they are inflexible because renumbering millions of books would be impracticable; they are as non-objective and impermanent as tags because Dewey allocated more numbering space to Christianity than to Islam, and so on and on. It’s all true to some degree, but too full of cheap shots and lacking in context. Your point about the Web 2.0 assertion that librarians never considered users’ needs is well taken. Nor do things come out quite the same way with LC Subject Headings. Worse, the whole argument for tagging takes places in an intellectual vacuum, as if librarians hadn’t been talking about these issues for centuries, and as if librarians and Del.icio.us users were trying to solve the same problem, and librarians were just worse at it.

    As you note, presuming your point and proving it are not the same thing. SOMEBODY has to test this stuff. On balance, I’m excited about folksonomies. Even without rigorous testing, I think it’s clear there are SOME domains in which they make more sense than traditional cataloging, or, for example, full text searching. But is that true for libraries? I don’t know. I’d like to see some data before making up my mind whether, as you put it, tags are a “better way of organizing information broadly.”

    In my gut, I think the answer is that the question is misframed. There is no “best” or “better” way of organizing information. Organization is not a end but a means. “Better” for what? For whom? Under what circumstances? When the dust settles I expect tags to take their place alongside other ways of finding stuff—good for some things, worse for others.* Other new ways, like full text searches or “people who own X also own Y” statistics of LibraryThing, will also be there, how prominently we can only guess. In any case, professional cataloging will not go away.

    Lastly, let me put in a personal plea. Won’t SOMEONE take me up on my offer to put LibraryThing data at the service of academia? LibraryThing has 2.6 million tags—FAR more than Amazon or any other book service. And they’re about BOOKS, not websites, restaurants or snapshots. Isn’t there some enterprising library science grad student who wants what I got?

    *Footnote on useful and un-useful tags:

    As Shirky argues, no library has a “queer” classification, yet “queer” means a lot to a lot of people. Armistead Maupin’s _Tales of the City_ is one of LibraryThing’s top “queer” books (http://www.librarything.com/catalog/24748). The LC subject headings are “City and town life” and “Humorous stories.” In this case, I think tags come out on top. Nobody searches for “city and town life” “humorous stories”—not unless they want the City Mouse and the Country Mouse. Users’ tagging here also produces some good reading suggestions.

    But there are just as many cases where tags fall down. For example, I use the tag “magic” to apply to my collection of academic monographs on Greek and Roman magic, with some cross-cultural comparanda. On LibraryThing, once I leave my own catalog, magic is entirely taken over by fantasy books.

    There might be some algorithmic way to mitigate the context-less nature of tags—for a program to see that magic “clusters” in different ways—but the core problem will never go away. The advantages of tagging—brevity, spontaneity, low barriers to entry, etc.—are also its disadvantages.

  • <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Tim,

    Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I agree with you that folksonomies and taxonomies will coexist; that there are areas where one is more useful or relevant than the other. Thanks also for articulating some of what I was trying to get at, especially when you wrote about the discussion in favor of tagging has taken place in an intellectual vacuum.

    As I noted to you separately in an email, I would like to take you up on your offer to somehow utilize what you’ve built for academic research.

  • <![CDATA[Mother]]>

    O.k., so what does folksonomies mean to some of us old folks?

  • <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Mother, I like the definition fo folksonomy given by Answers.com here. And the fact that links to further information are available.

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