Libraries 2.0 week 8: Social OPACs

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.