Karen,
I haven't studied folksonomies or LibraryThing much (I have been to a
couple of ALA programs that talked about folksonomies), but I would have
to say that non-controlled vocabulary shouldn't, at the very least, be
something catalogers or other library staff have to deal with on a daily
basis.
I'll get into those postings on LibraryThing.
I just read your article on Weinberger's "Everything is miscellaneous":
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/05/weinbergers-well-ordered-misc
ellany.html
on the coming of the Third Order, where "all the old rules are blown out
of the water. Parcels of knowledge are no longer bound by 'either-or
decisions," and can be in many places at once; knowledge does not fit
into finite boxes or even have a shape; and--most disturbingly, though
in Weinberger's hands, also most entertainingly--messiness is a virtue.
He explains this point repeatedly but no better than in a section
discussing Flickr, where automated and human-supplied metadata create "a
mess than gets richer in potential and more useful every day. ...
Third-order messes reverse entropy, becoming more meaningful as they
become messier, with more relationships built in.'"
While the book sounds interesting, I'd have to stay I'll stick with the
Second Order until I see strong evidence we have to give it up. You say
near the end:
"This is, I repeat, a dangerous book. Ban it, burn it, or take it to
heart."
I don't think those are our only choices. We can still disagree with it,
too. Based on your description, I do for the reasons I gave before: it's
a serious confusion between the roles of libraries and the Web.
It's interesting how book banning and burning are the big "hot button"
issues discussed again and again in American Libraries and other
publications. We librarians love to posture ourselves as people who
oppose such threats to freedom. I'm as opposed to that as anyone else,
but to me, it's striking how little attention is given to the sort of
threat ideas like Weinberger's pose to libraries. You pointed out
yourself that he appears not to have even stepped into one any time
recently. And yet you're ready to see him as a guiding light as to what
libraries have to accept?
--Ted Gemberling
Not an official statement of the UAB Lister Hill Library (you probably
know that by now! Nothing I post would be.)
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of K.G. Schneider
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:52 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Libraries & the Web--was Down and The Shaft
> intervene in, in some way. If it's "tagging" or "folksonomies" of some
> sort that are not put on the MARC record, are just part of some user's
> "my catalog,"
No, the point of tagging and folksonomies (something that
"mylibrary"-style
applications of the 1990s weren't quite savvy about) is that they are
part
of the collective zeitgeist. The "aboutness" of a bibliographic resource
swirls out much farther than the fields we work with. This is why the
LibraryThing recommendations for Danbury Library's catalog are so
profound:
they are a dynamic "aboutness" related to what people think about a
resource.
> standards. Those standards exist partly to keep costs down...
How we do things may add significant value-though we need to improve our
tools, and by that I mean not software but our intellectual framework
for
metadata-but it's not cost-saving.
My first take, a quick one, suggested that LibraryThing's added value
for
Danbury lies in social information-something our library data is poor at
(if
you like A, you will like B, C, and D). Where LT did poorly (editions)
was
on the kind of predictive information we do well at (resource A has a
relationship to B, C, and D). This is just a coarse layman's take.
K.G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
http://freerangelibrarian.com
Received on Wed May 16 2007 - 13:28:42 EDT