Tagging – Chaos or Personalized Order?

In my 30 years at the Spokane Falls Library I have had conversations with students who did not like the way the subjects were organized in the Dewey Decimal System and wanted to create their own version. At the time I thought only a crazy person would want to do this. I was so wrong. The current hot topic is tagging. Tagging allows each person to use his own terms to mark websites for later retrieval. My knee jerk reaction was one of horror – I could see nothing but anarchy and chaos ahead.

Then I ran across this clear, graphically illustrated defense of tagging as opposed to controlled vocabulary classification schemes for the digital environment. It makes a great case for library schemes being well designed for a physical book on a shelf, but wholly inadequate for the wild and wooly web:
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

So, while I was in the middle of reading this article a patron came up to the desk. He was just learning about electronic file folders and how to organize them and he had a problem. He did not want his folders in alphabetical order and couldn’t understand why Microsoft WORD wouldn’t let him organize them his own way. This time my reaction was different. Yes, why did the folders have to be in alphabetical order? Obviously the wave of the future is that patrons are going to expect lots of control over how access to information is organized – and they will get it.

Related links:

‘Tagging’ helps unclutter data


Tags: The real time web organized by you