Brave New World (of Tagging)

Well, Clay Shirky's article proved to be really interesting. If you went to Dan Cohen's Arcadia Seminar then you will have encountered all these views before, but it was really useful to take some time out to read and ponder about classification on the web. Google's flexible searching has made Yahoo largely redundant as a search engine. I have to confess that I have hardly ever used Yahoo - I went straight to Google when I started using the web for work. Now it seems that we are at the beginning of a new revolution with Web2.0 tags providing flexibility for retrieval that the Library of Congress subject headings can't.

I think the Ann Arbor library catalogue is great. I'd love to see Newton look like that too. It's an exciting way to rejuvenate your library's online catalogue. The list of most popular tags is interesting - but perhaps not as helpful as it might be! You get the dross at the top: i.e. "Picture book" and "Picturebook" which account for thousands of tags and is not a very helpful search term. I went down the list until I found something more specific and clicked on "Anime" (281 tags). I then narrowed it down to "Books" instead of DVDs. Here's a screenshot:

It's great to introduce some interactivity into subject retrieval! Even for a trained librarian the Library of Congress headings present problems: you have to be familiar with the way the headings are constructed and also the headings change over time. Recently, we have been updating our history of art records and the bib check programme has been rejecting a lot of records with the (obsolete) heading "Art and power". With Web2.0 tags the user could add "art and power" as a tag for retrieval - the flexibility is there!