Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Abby at LibraryThing has a great post about the strengths and weaknesses of tags and professionally-devised subject headings, and why it's helpful to have both, as LibraryThing now does.

As she says, one of the advantages of a taxonomy is that it can capture the difference between Philosophy > History and History > Philosophy, whereas simply having those two tags on an object doesn't tell you enough. Of course, with enough tags and fiercely clever algorithms, it's possible a computer could automagically tell the difference, but the human taxonomizer is likelier to get it right. And, as she says, tagging opens up the possibility of a book being "sort of" a (say) dystopia or "78%" a dystopia (to take Joshua Schachter's example).