Cataloging Futures

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 :)

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.