Tag, You're It !

Greetings!
This week's ProjectPlay assignment was to investigate tags on various sites such as del.icio.us and to blog about implications for public libraries. Well. When I was in library science school -- back in the days when books were replacing papyrus rolls (And you should have heard the complaints about that radical new technology then! The idea of turning a page and going from the bottom of one page to the top of the next instead of being able to continuously scroll down a page was bemoaned as the end of civilization as we knew it. But I digress.) -- the class I enjoyed the most was cataloging. I enjoyed it because there actually was a right answer (or maybe two right answers if you made your case extremely well). Unlike the rest of library science (The science part is really a misnomer because there really is nothing very scientific about it. Information systems, because they mirror the human intellect (because humans create it), tend to be organic. Searching for data is an inuititve process that runs more on hunches than repeatable, "scientific" techniques. But I digress. Again.) classifying information has a system or method to it. If you understood the system, you could correctly classify the item (ususally a book). Having a corrrect answer can be very comforting. Especially when you're a student and are looking for certainty. As I have matured, I've realized that certainty (as well as control, power, and a few other things that I can't recall right now) is an illusion. So the idea of a right answer isn't nearly as attractive to me now. All the preceeding was a very long wind up for this "pitch". I think the idea of libraries using tagging is extremely cool! I think libraries have been way too rigid about many things and that using tags and allowing tagging is a way of letting go of some of that rigidity. I think that tagging may be to cataloging what the King James Version of the Bible was to the authority of the church. Tagging is a fine example of participatory democracy. The people get to speak and the power of the group gets expressed by "voting" the terms that make sense to you. This is also language evolving right in front of our eyes. It is so cool! If a given term makes sense to describe a book you just read you tag it with that word. If others see that term and it makes sense to them, that tag gets used more and more. The more the tag is used the more people become aware of that tag and they start to use it too. This is language evolving dynamically. I also like the idea of tagging because I truly believe the group is smarter than the individuals that make up the group. Having many minds creating a "subject heading" allows all the various subtleties of language to be expressed in the tags all the members of the group assign. The more the merrier, and the more the better the tag's definition is. Tags on library websites is the obvious way to go. Tag clouds will take people to what others find fascinating and will let everyone who wants to, participate in the social network the cloud creates. I think I'll quit now.
Until next time, play on!