Comments on: PennTags – When card catalogs meet tags

By: Bob Walther

Bob Walther — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:30:15 +0000

I am a colleague of Laurie Allen's at the Penn Library (but not part of the PennTags project). To me the most interesting aspect of the "tagging of the library catalog" is not the folksonomy aspect of the tags themselves but rather the ability of users to add (permanent?) annotations or comments to the library catalog records. The tagging may help some users with browsing but good annotations would help almost everyone using the catalog. To see an example of what I mean you can go to the Penn catalog Franklin and do a title search for the book "Close up, 1927-1933: cinema and modernism." The PennTag is at the bottom of the record.

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:12:36 +0000

my guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it.

Blimey, is the revolution over already?

Not to be snarky, this all sounds eminently reasonable & constructive – I liked Jay’s comment, too. The idea of the single, rigid, hierarchical, non-extensible, pre-obsoleted taxonomy always was a bit of a strawman.

By: Jay Fienberg

Jay Fienberg — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 18:08:34 +0000

With the library catalog I worked on, where we had tags + taxonomies: the tags almost never changed existing taxonomies, and the tags + taxnomies worked in a complementary manner.

However, the librarians did create new taxonomies out of emerging patterns in the tags.

As an example, the library, at one time, had no recorded music in its collection, but had music books as part of several different “Arts” categories.

While the library built up a collection of recorded music, the CDs / LPs were both added to existing Arts categories and tagged with music genres and other attributes that can be applied to music (e.g., music, folk, blues, Romania, guitar, male vocalist, digital recording, etc.).

At a point when the recorded music collection had taken a lot of shape, a separate recorded music taxonomy was created by the librarians and added to the catalog, building from and incorporating the user tags.

One of the reasons the taxonomies didn’t change much was that they were designed to be broadly inclusive. The things one can get from a more detailed categorization were handled through multiple approaches (facets / multiple taxonomies, tags, full text search) that co-existed.

btw, I don’t remember if you were at Peter van Dijk’s Facets and Tags presentation at the IA Summit, but I thought he made some excellent points about how much benefit can come out of doing a little work to figure out a few facets into which tags can live. Recommended.