Librarians Need to be Flexible.
January 23rd, 2005Regarding open tagging structures and folksonomies, Clay Shirky writes:
“What’s certain is that the explosion of content that makes folksonomies a forced move was a done deal a long time ago. The librarians are now in the same situation as the journalists: “What will happen when everyone can do what we do, without having to be professionally trained?” And the answer, as always, is “We’ll see.”
He makes an interesting point. Bloggers are forcing journalists to rethink their jobs and folksonomies might do the same for librarians. I say ‘might’ because if information professionals play this the right way, we can become (ironically) one of the key players of open tagging structures. The DDC and Cutter systems are very rigid and they work well. Library science was build on the ability to catalog books according to structure.
Yet, we are also flexible. If we don’t agree with the information assigned to a piece of work, we can change it to fit our needs. Libraries all over the country use different forms of cataloging schema in their buildings (for the betterment of their constituencies), but the basics are still there. The same goes with folksonomies. Even though it is an open system of tagging documents, the basic meanings are still there. We’re just doing it to fit our needs.
One of my mantras about keeping current in our field is that in order to keep our jobs fresh, exciting, and technologically sound, we should work as if we need to justify our existence everyday to our employer. This forces us to work harder (it has for me). Librarians can’t ignore open tagging systems: We can debate it, discuss it, and even implement it. But we can’t ignore it. Doing so could be detrimental to the future of our profession.