On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Tim Spalding wrote:
> >Social tagging:
>
> This is a big and interesting topic. Here's $.02.
>
> There's a balance between selfish and altruistic, and some gradients
> in between, like when a member of a church tags things for the benefit
> of a small group. There is also, if not an incentive to tag
> altruistically, something of a desire not to appear a fool. I see this
> on LT all the time. Everyone's tags are public, so people are
> conscious to note that that Ann Coulter book was a gift. Or, take my
> brother (please!), who tags his small collection of semi-erotica
> "sex!" Wink wink nudge nudge.
This is actually a limitation in the current concept of social
tagging, to me. On LibraryThing, for example, I want to tag my
books in a way that will be useful to the larger social tagging
pool: "fiction", perhaps, or "cyberpunk". But I also want to tag
them in ways which will be useful to me: "gift from mum", "on the
shelf in the dining room", "chewed on by a cat". Out of all of
those, I can only see "gift from mum" potentially being something
which adds to the social tagging pool ("look, everybody's copies
of _How to Become a Better Daughter in 90 Days_ is tagged 'gift
from mum' or some variant!"). But certainly all of those tags in
the second set are what I would consider to be private. Nobody
else's business but mine. Where books are laid out in my house,
personal information about provenance or condition, statements
about what they mean to me ("comfort book", for example).
So because social tagging as a concept is social, it's designed
as public. And therefore, because I desire to keep certain
information private, I can't use it for personal cataloging.
Since I can't make some tags private and viewable only to me,
tags are limited in their functionality as cataloging tools. For
me.
-Deborah
--
Deborah Kaplan
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Brandeis University
Received on Fri Feb 23 2007 - 10:43:59 EST