Tagging

I found Clay Shirky's essay very thought-provoking, particularly the idea that due to the absence of physical constraints in the digital world, classification of material on the web is freed from the types of organisational schemes we use in libraries. However, while a book's classification is limited to one subject and specific area due to the need to give a book one individual classmark, subject headings provide access points to books that recognise the various topics that are covered within. Yes, the vocabulary used in these subject headings are highly controlled, but it is this use of an authoritative vocabulary that facilitates a uniform standard. This has the affect of aiding access to and retrieval of material that is relevant to a users area of interest. Nevertheless, difficulties may arise where a user expresses a search term in vocabulary that is different to that used in a subject heading.

User tagging of digital content provides a much greater flexibility in the choice of vocabulary to classify material. It can therefore be much more personal and subjective. I largely agree with Shirky that the variety that is produced by this flexibility should not be seen as chaos, and that the different vocabularies used by people do indeed have subtle differences in meaning, such as the movies and cinema example. It allows for different view points and ideas to be represented and undoubtedly allows for a democratization of content by allowing users to specify what is of value to them. So long as tags aid retrieval, they are definitiely useful. It seems that more popular and frequntly used tags gain more importance, and as such a form of hierarchy is formed-I suppose this is good generally, but perhaps is not necessarily so in every case as it places greater value on more common terms/ideas?

I must admit I am not entirely sure about what to make of tagging. Overall I think it's good, and don't have much of a problem with it, but in the course of writing this blog I seem to have become rather more uncertain, and I apologise for the probable incoherent nature of this post! I'm not sure what to think of incorporating tags into library OPACs, maybe that would be useful? It's definitely a topic I will give more thought to, right now I need a break!