Re: Book tagging: Amazon and LibraryThing

I don't know, I'd be interested to know what individuals consider
"comfort books", personally.  Though I do agree that where it is in the
house, or the fact that the main character reminds you of an ex, ought
to be personal.
-Margaret

Margaret E. Hazel
Eugene Public Library
Eugene, OR


-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Deborah Kaplan
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 8:24 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Book tagging: Amazon and LibraryThing

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