> An interesting thing is happening to the library world and that involves
> new classification schemes based on user-tagging. This system is used by
> sites such as Flickr. The democracy of this system worries some
> librarians and excites others. I like the new technology, because I
> think that librarians should be facilitators, not gatekeepers. And if
> you'v eever tried to find stuff in the Yellow Pages, you'll understand
> the limitations of fixed classification schemes.
User-tagging, social-bookmarking, that kind of stuff, may generate interesting matrices of information, but does it really lend itself to developing complex taxonomies?
When Wikipedia introduced its article category feature a couple of years ago, it was pretty messy. You had people creating impossibly broad, impossibly narrow, impossibly subjective categories on a whim, and frequently the lack of a standardized naming scheme meant overlap and redundancy. Some of these problems may have been resolved, I dunno. Some still flame up, I think, like the category "terrorists" (I argued against it).
The wiki approach to just about everything is bottom-up, and that egalitarian spirit has its charms. But, paradoxically enough, it doesn't seem work very well for devising complex classification schemes. I mean: would it be the best interest of everyone to have non-librarians organizing the books of the Library of Congress? Or does Google make the whole idea of fixed classifications redundant?
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam