This week's adventures take us to a world called Folksonomy.
I checked 3 OPACs: LibraryThing, LibraryThing for Libraries (Danbury Library), and Endeca (North Carolina State University).
We'll just skip right over Endeca because I had trouble seeing how it was a Social OPAC. I couldn't find tags anywhere.
Danbury Library was a bit better. It appeared to me that you could only search with tags by going to a record with tags and clicking on one from there. But this gave me a good example of a flaw of folksonomy. The book Patton had tags, but no one thought to include the tag "Patton," thus any tag search for Patton would have missed the book Patton. And, of course, that's only including the books people have thought to tag. Unpopular books would become even more unpopular as they would be ignored by a search engine (I hope I'm using that term correctly.) But Danbury Library demonstrated a good mix of traditional cataloging and folksonomy, as both are valuable.
LibraryThing was a hoot. It's a little too personalized. People would placing "Read in 2006," "Read in 2007," "read," "unread," etc. as tags, but no traditional cataloging (unless you count the library-types in who sneaked in and used library terms as tags). I'd be too worried to miss something using this. At least with Danbury Library, I could start on tags and run to a librarian as a backup plan. (I strongly encourage going to a librarian near the beginning of the process, for best results.)
Of the three, I like Danbury Library's the best. It gave the best of both worlds and gave me the options to use as I see fit.
And have a good day.
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2 comments:
Endeca doesn't have tagging--you are right. It has other features like relevance ranking and faceted browsing that throw it in this category.
It's interesting that you should comment that, "Unpopular books would become even more unpopular," as I think that LibraryThing and some of its peers are usually regarded as just the opposite--tools that make the "long tail" of books visible. I also thought that your comment on the restrictions of folksonomy were interesting. Tim Spalding, the creator of LibraryThing, talks a lot about how the sheer amount of tagging in LibraryThing usually means that personal tags filter out, but apparently you found some!
Glad you liked the Danbury Catalog!
Yes, I can see how I have it backward in some ways. It only takes one person being a fan of an item to tag it and enter it into the folksonosphere. However, aren't there some items which people use but no one is a big enough fan to actually take the time to tag? I mean, not every author's mother is 2.0 savvy.
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