Joho the Blog
|
|
|
June 10, 2006
I talked with Laurie Allen yesterday during the lunch break at the Annenberg conference on hyperlinks. She works on U of Pennsylvania's PennTags project that allows readers to tag catalogued books. Some people use tags for personal bookmarking. Others tag more socially. It's a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so! By integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy), you instantaneously get the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure. I didn't talk with Laurie about this, but 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. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, but the folksonomy could supplement it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for "recipes" could take you to the "cuisine" category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here's the tag cloud for the node you're browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair. Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project. (U of Penn's Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you're interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, the death of the Internet due to the venal stupidity of Congress, etc.) [Tags: penntags laurie_allen taxonomy libraries folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous tagging ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 10, 2006 10:47 AM
|
Comments
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.
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | June 10, 2006 01:08 PM
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.
Posted by: Phil | June 12, 2006 07:12 AM
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.
Posted by: Bob Walther | June 12, 2006 12:30 PM