Margaret E HAZEL writes:
> I don't think I'd force people to create a distinction between public and
> private tags, but it would be kind and a good privacy/intellectual freedom
> (we're librarians, remember?) tool to offer the option to have private
tags.
Selectively public tagging opens up a huge can of worms.
David Bigwood described a probably-common scenario of:
] the research scientist who tags items, so he and his team can find them
] again doesn't need any others to tag those items.
Combining the two issues, produces the probably-common scenario of the
individual or group that wants to tag items for personal own benefit, but
don't want others seeing what they're working on.
Remember several years back when Amazon piloted release of sales data by
company or city? IBM didn't want the world knowing that its developers were
stocking up on Java books. The service was finally dropped after many major
companies objected.
I think the same would happen here, on smaller scale.
If libraries/tags must be public in a system, then a certain small
percentage of users might choose a different (or no) tool, because privacy
is that important to them.
If you offer the option of public OR private libraries/tagging, many people
who might otherwise have contributed to the aggregate will instead choose
privacy, reducing the pool of data to draw upon and thus providing a less
accurate overall picture of the book.
If a segment of the userbase uses public tags/metadata but doesn't
contribute, that could also create perceptions of parasitism, further
hampering community-building efforts.
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Mike Taylor
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2007 1:34 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Book tagging: Amazon and LibraryThing
Deborah Kaplan writes:
> On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Tim Spalding wrote:
> 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".
I don't think the primary distinction here is between public and private
tags: it's between tagging the Work and the Item (in FRBR terms). It's not
the case that _Pride and Prejudice_ is on the shelf in the dining room; but
_my copy_ of P&P is.
_/|_
___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/ Mike Taylor <mike_at_indexdata.com>
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\ "Changes too great to undo" -- GNU Emacs, version 18 (thanks
a lot!)
Received on Mon Feb 26 2007 - 15:34:08 EST