Or, as we used to call it at school, ‘It’. I don’t think Librarians play this game nearly enough, and what the profession definitely needs is more running around in the fresh air trying to catch other people so that they can then be ‘It’.
Not that kind of tagging you say? Oh. Ok, well to be honest I found that essay kind of confusing – I sure hope they’re a good public speaker. Here are some of my thoughts relating to tagging/categorization/classification/ontology/whatever:
1) It seems to me that there are two different basic concepts here. The first is ‘categorization’ which is charcterised by a pre-existent system that tries and fails to cover every eventuality when organising information. This is what we, as librarians, deal with on a day-to-day basis and is governed by the need to fit LOTS of books into a limited physical space in some kind of sensible order. The second is ‘tagging’ for which there is no system at all (other than on an individual basis, and sometimes not even then). This is not imposed, but applied after you know what the content is. It’s infinitely more flexible and vastly less standardised, and is ultimately not governed by any particular need to orgainse or any physical limitations.
2) These two approaches lend themselves to two different sources of information; the library and the virtual environment respectively. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we replace classification schemes with tagging in libraries, but there doesn’t appear to be any reason why we couldn’t run concurrent systems and reap the rewards of both, just as they’re doing over in Ann Arbor.
3) One of the main problems that people flag up with tagging is it’s inconsistency, and concerns that it either links you to information that’s not relevant, or that you miss out on retrieving stuff that is. Um, call me Mr. Silly, but isn’t that the case with any kind of tagging/calssification/categorization/information retrieval system? Why are we all so lazy? We are NEVER going to be able to come up with a system whereby we retrieve everything that is relevant but nothing that is surplus to our requirements! For a start ‘what is relevant’ is entirely subjective anyway, as is the content of a particular book or article or post. At some point we have to do some of the leg-work ourselves and actually use our brains. Where we put a book on the shelves, or which tag(s) we give our blog post, is just a starting point – as information professionals we have a reponsibility to categorize in the way we think will be most useful. Yes, there’s subjectivity involved, but we can’t escape it, and if we (as users) aren’t prepared to ‘read around’ then we have to accept that there’s something we might miss.
Am I ranting?
4) By the time you’ve a) looked at the tags given by the person who created content and b) looked at the tags given by other people who’ve read the content, you c) may as well have read the thing in the first place and made your own mind up? I realise that this is slightly extreme, and there can be a lot of value in gauging other people’s reactions and interpretations of things, but I’m not sure that tagging is necessarily the best medium for this.
To conclude (you’ll be glad to hear):
Yes to classifying, categorizing and tagging! – people find these useful as ways of linking and accessing information, but we shouldn’t be scared of encouraging people to make their own minds up too, and therefore people shouldn’t rely on another’s interpretation of content. Phew!
whispersinthewilderness 