Cataloging Futures

Tagging: the web imitates the card catalog?

Recent post at the.effing.librarian blog, The card catalog: "I'm back, baby!" takes an ascerbic look at tagging and the semantic web and how this trend is reminiscent of, you guessed it, the card catalog.

I half-assed read something the other day that had me wondering. It was just a simple tweet by some twittererer about teaching kids intelligent tagging, and that's all it was, just a mention of some teacher attempting to get kids to think. But the twittererer included some additional observation, although with only 140 characters to play with, I now can't remember what it was.

But (yes, I'm still looking as I type this for the tweet) it was something about teaching kids to write for the internet and how tagging will become more and more important.

And it made me think that the future of the internet was moving away from keyword and full text toward an index of useful (and standardized) terms. And that these kids would need to learn these terms if they wanted to succeed in the online world, to have their data found through their mastery of metadata.

And my first thought was, Holy Shit, this is some librarian plot to bring back the card(less) catalog.

And that's exactly what it is.

Faviki: a controlled vocabulary tagging tool

Yesterday, a cataloger friend of mine mentioned this tagging tool: Faviki, which according to its blog is:

A social bookmarking tool that allows you to tag webpages you want to remember using Wikipedia terms. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world's largest collection of knowledge. [emphasis added]

What Faviki calls "common tagging" is a move away from free tagging to the use of a common vocabulary. Looks like the web is turning us all into catalogers :)

New book on tagging

A few weeks ago I bought Gene Smith's book, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. This looks like it's going to be a great read!

Problems with Tagging

I'm very pro tagging and think that library patrons  should be allowed to add tags to bibliographic records in library catalogs. That being said, I'm trying to keep an open mind to see how this social experience of tagging is developing both pro and con. Here's a link to a brief article, "Tagging: It’s no longer fun and easy". It raising some problems that are developing as tagging becomes more popular.

• "The first problem with tagging is semantic vagueness. For example, does the tag “china” apply to the country or crockery?"
• "A second problem is that the format of tags isn’t standardized."
• "The third and perhaps biggest problem is the overuse of tagging. How often have you seen a blog item with a list of tags almost as long as the item itself?"

The conclusion is that tagging will become more standardized and complex in the future.

"... in the near future you will either not be bothering with tagging or you’ll have moved on to the next generation of tagging which will be more complex (probably based on XML) and demand more effort to use. Tagging will no longer be fun and easy."

Of course, as catalogers and metadata librarians, we are use to such standardization and complexity using the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Via International and Comparative Librarianship

A Cataloger Attempts to Tag

So, my cataloger's OCD is kicking in and instead of assigning tags with wild abandon, I'm creating a list of tags--a "controlled vocabulary" for this blog. For those catalogers who are new to tagging (like me), here's a great overview "Tagging vs. Cataloging: What It's All About" by Chiara Fox who is a former librarian turned information architect.