>On 2/22/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>
>> 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?
I spent 10 years indexing books as my major source of income, and believe me, while the work is tedious it's not self-evident. It takes time to learn how to do it well. You have to anticipate how people will look for things, figure out how to group similar concepts expressed in different words together, provide useful cross-referencing, etc. So...
At 12:25 AM +0100 2/23/06, Colin Brace wrote:
>Or
>does Google make the whole idea of fixed classifications redundant?
Google is great, but it's still no substitute for a human-created subject index. There are too many ways to express the same concept to rely on word and phrase searches alone.
Doug