Folksonomies continued...

This weeks articles cover the many aspects of tagging and folksonomies and their advantages and disadvantages from a variety of viewpoints. I wondered why Ellyssa Kroski called her article 'The Hive Mind' and looking at Wikipedia it is a kind of groupthink or collective consciousness and conformity or a software framework - maybe the collective consciousness of social insects such as bees. The article was inaccessible on the Internet on Tuesday evening (June 26th) around 9.30 pm. However I had read it earlier in the week and was interested to read about the 'Long Tail' phenomenon which had not come across before. It is relevant to tagging where the views of the minorities with less popular tags will be more in number than the more popular tags. The non mainstream topics outnumber the more popular ones and it is descriptive of a graph showing a long tail at the end of the statistical distribution.

Two of the articles this week, one by Emanuele Quinterelli and by Carol Ou talk about finding the 'middle ground' between user tagging at one end and the classification by a librarian at the other end and this may be the future direction of social bookmarking. Alex Wright wrote that
'a middle ground between.. bottom up tagging and top down controlled vocabularies....where end users could freely create, adopt or reject terms stored in a distributed repository that gets administered by a representative authority that 'owns' the vocabulary'

Emanuele Quinterelli says that 'All that we have to do is to merge and leverage emerging and traditional tools to improve findability. Somewhere at the intersection of those two models is a more powerful framework for identifying, sharing and finding information.'

He concludes by saying that 'Traditional hierarchies for organising information (or reality) will not be replaced by tags, but through tagging we are finding new ways of thinking about classification and new applications for organising and sharing knowledge'. He sees tagging and the new bottom up system as being a step towards a new way of organising information that will develop in the future. This is the view supported by Jon Lebowski.

In summary I liked the comment by Timo Hannay where he describes a folksonomy as a 'liberating, not restrictive; bottom up, not imposed; relational, not hierarchical. It also cleverly harnesses selfish acts and directs them towards the common good. But most of all, it just seems to fit the way our brains work'

Del.icio.us in the Libraries

Looking at the case studies this week showing how libraries use the social tagging site 'Del.icio.us' reminded me of the old 'Vertical File' system I used to maintain working in a public and school library. These were documents that I would save under a specific label which might be useful for someone researching this topic of for a school project for example. The difference here is that I would be the only person doing this and presumably in the libraries in the case studies there are many people choosing articles from the Internet and 'saving' them in a file under their library name in Del.icio.us. Why are the saving them?? I was looking at the tag cloud in the LaGrange Park Library and wondering why anyone would tag a website showing a list of free knitting patterns. I have nothing against knitting, but what does this have to do with the library? There is a tag called 'cicadas' which takes the user to a very nice site on cicadas in Illinois, but where is the relevance to the library?

I have looked at Maui Community College library and wondered why there would be tagged a site on the Big Business of Dairy farming? It is even listed on the library homepage. Its an interesting informative site, but what is its relevance with Maui Community College Library?

The Penn Tags site opens with a tag cloud of popular tags and then lists pages and pages of boring information that would take hours to unravel and work out what the content is. I am really not sure what all this is about.

The Seldovia library at Del.icio.us is more of what I would expect for a library to tag and there appears to be many tags related to library information. Once again it looks like a vertical file with the library related tags in a darked and larger font making them more visible. It would be nice to be able to link the title of the library on the top of the page to the library website. I would like to use that to find out where the library was located.

The Thomas Ford Memorial Library has only 65 tags in the tag cloud which is a small number considering that they have been tagging for at least two years. Once again I am not sure why tags for 'recipes' and 'food' are listed here.

It seems by looking at these tags for libraries that anything can be tagged and there are no rules or guidelines to decide what can or cannot be included in a library's bookmarking site.

The number of tags at Lansing Public Library is enormous and once again looks like the old 'vertical file'. If the purpose for the long alphabetical list of subjects under the auspices of the library is to provide an access point for students or any researchers to find information on anything listed, then this is surely not the way to do research. I looked under the 'Dickens' tag and found only one site, 'Birds' had 4 sites, 'Ecology' had 4 and 'Soccer' had 4. Based on this it would be more efficient and effective to search 'Google' to find any required information.

Michael Jenson in his article on 'The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority' in the Chronicle Review described Del.icio.us as 'a collection of favourite sites where descriptive tags denoting contents raise the authority of the listed site'
If this is the purpose of tagging a site especially under the auspices of a library, then there needs to be some guidelines established as to the authority, content and future use of the website.
In my opinion, just because someone tags it for personal future use be it in a library or not, does not immediately raise the authority of the site.