More on TLA
April 9th, 2005I’m home after two days of meeting and greeting at the Texas Library Association Meeting. Both of my presentations went well (they are both online - ppt format) and, as I said before, the people were wonderful. I want to thank the TLA committee for their generous hospitality, especially Maribel Garza-Castro for being my point of contact and tour guide for the past two days.
One of the librarians I met in Austin was Alicia, whom I pegged as an LJ user when I first met her (I’m usually dead on with that - I have pretty good “LJ-dar.”) She has a blog, which I’ve since subscribed to, and had a few thoughts on the conference and my sessions:
“The second session was about social networking. Mmm. Love it. It was weird. I didn’t expect to be going to sessions like this. I thought I would be going to a lot of Young Adult writers stuff (I did go to some… very interesting too!). But at this library conference, we talked about del.icio.us and wikipedia. I felt like all of the things that I had been reading about for weeks had been preparing me, and all the things I was interested in converged. It was awesome.”
I was told that TLA is made up of 75% school librarians, so I wasn’t expecting many people at the afternoon session (the AM session was pretty well attended) as I was up against stiff competition, and wasn’t sure how a presentation on social networks and collaboration would fit into that crowd. It turns out that they were interested in it and the attendance was bigger than I thought. Good for you school librarians! Alicia on folksonomonies:
“We (it was quite like a discussion instead of a one sided presentation) talked about del.icio.us as a way that everyone classifies information. The information is classified according to how the people want to use it. I love it. But sometimes I search for things and I don’t know if it is that it is not tagged yet or that I just don’t know the correct tags to use. The other day I was looking for online professional development courses for teaching english in high school. I tried prof_dev. Well I tagged one thing I found as prof_dev and then I saw that someone else had tagged that. But that person used professionaldevelopment. The whole individual tags thing is great. It is what makes del.icio.us so fabulous. But if I want to contribute to the system and I want the system to recognize my tags, I (personal decision) want to use the ones that are most popular (assuming they work for me). So if most people use professionaldevelopment instead of prof_dev, I want to use professionaldevelopment. But what I really want, is a way to find out what most people use to tag certain things. Without doing a trial and error. Because I can do that. But I can only do that if I can guess at what people might be calling things or look at their own tags on the websites.”
As I mentioned to her at the session, I think that if this is done, it would ruin the collective nature of open tagging systems. What makes them useful is that people tag stuff according to their own ontological rules, rather than having to use others’ rules. Sure, del.icio.us helps us decide on tags if the site (it gives us suggestions based on what other people have tagged the item) has been bookmarked already in its system, but the openness of it is what makes it work. In essence, rules get thrown out the window. I like that. Also, I tried to move away of using the term ‘classification’ when discussing del.icio.us. Even it’s creator doesn’t like to use that term. Del.icio.us is a form of expression, a way of getting beyond classifying. It’s also about going beyond search when looking for information. And it’s the “wisdom of the crowds” that makes it so useful.