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.