NEASIST Embedded library meeting - LibraryThing
The third speaker was Tim Spalding [corrected from Peter - see his comment - my mind must have been wandering at the time, inventor of LibraryThing. He exsplained how it came about, how it works, spent at least 15 minutes slagging off on LCSH (but mainly for fiction, which is a bit unfair), and a very short time on the downsides of tagging. I do admire LibraryThing, and I also like that it is shaking up libraries a bit. He really doesn't think it will replace OPACs, and he is very into partnering with libraries.
Comments
[Hey, can you correct my name? It's Tim Spalding.. Sorry to write so much; feel free to treat as a private message, not a blog comment.]
No, good point about fiction. I should look for more good examples in non-fiction. Fiction is easier because the subjects and books are more generally known. "Chic lit" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" is familiar to everyone; my non-fiction examples--"Darwin's Black Box" and "Austrian economics"--lose people.
I understand it seems like I was slagging. Although tags and subjects do different things, showing that tags are good for X isn't very compelling unless you see that subject's aren't. I freely admit that tags don't solve all or even most probles of findability and that controlled subject headings are not going to be "replaced" by tags. I'll try to post twin "when they work"/"when they fail" posts soon. If we can shift from"tags are cool/evil" to "tags work/break HERE," I think we'll have moved the conversation forward.
Posted by: Tim | October 3, 2006 05:44 PM
I honestly think that we have already moved on from the tags are cool/evil, and would like to see more of the tags work/break here. There is a growing body of research on this topic in the LIS literature. Also, LC is about to break LCSH anyway, so although my students do need to understand how LCSH work and why they are useful, they also get to write papers on folksonomy, and we talk about tagging in class as well (from the first day, as a matter of fact). I think you will find that most of us who teach subject analysis are pretty open-minded about this issue.
Posted by: Candy Schwartz | October 4, 2006 07:08 AM