Week 4: Urban Graffiti - Tag you're it!

People who have known me for a long time always laugh when I tell them I am now a librarian. While others spent their misspent youth misbehaving, I spent mine misbehaving, then going home and thinking up new ways of organising my CD collection (Alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within artist? Chronologically? By mood? Alphabetically by album title? The possibilities are endless, seriously.) Whenever I move house, one of the first things I unpack is my book collection, which is currently arranged alphabetically by author name, apart from dictionary/reference-type books, which are grouped by subject matter, in a vague dewey-type sequence.

Thankfully, I'm not the only nerd in the world who gets a kick out of organising my things. LibraryThing is an amazing site with an interface that allows users to catalogue their bookshelves, make book wishlists, and keep track of what they're reading, have read and want to read. You can check out my LibraryThing library here.

A vaguely similar website that allows users to catalogue cool stuff they find on the web is Delicious.

Delicious and LibraryThing are both sort-of based on the idea of folksonomies, or social or collaborative tagging. The idea is that instead of a top-down, ie information science approach to the categorisation, organisation and presentation/distribution of information (ie by librarians, curators, archivists, kaitiaki etc) certain information in the public domain can and should be categorised, organised an presented/distributed by members of the community. This could manifest as people "tagging" photos of themselves and their friends on facebook, or creating online bibliographic collections of a certain type - a blog roll, bookmark collection or tag cloud.

In theory, the idea of a "bottom-up" organisational approach to collaborative information is appealing, as again in theory, it allows those who create information to control it - to label it, describe it and use it how the choose.

However, the reality of folksonomy is not as excitingly border-breaking as its proponents would suggest. The problem with collaborative/people's information science/folksonomy/whatever else you'd like to call it is that it, like many web2.0 and other contemporary media studies theories, assumes that every internet user is a tertiary educated, socially-minded infonerd who enjoys alphabetising their CD collections (Bon Iver, Bright Eyes, M Ward, Sufjan Stevens, anyone?) It ignores the fact that most internet users view the internet as a consumer product of the subscriber-service kind, like cable TV. To most people, website interfaces that allow folksonomies are merely a personal convenience, like MySky. The fact is that the majority of internet users don't care about information collaboration, and use the internet primarily to buy stuff, laugh at internet memes that have more-or-less entered the pop culture mainstream, and to look at the wedding photos of people to whose wedding they were not invited.

The other grating aspect of folksonomy is the way that many folksonomy enthusiasts villify "traditional" information science and those who practice it. Folksonomy enthusiasts insist that collaborative organisation takes common information out of the hands of evil top-down information organisers (which lumps librarians, archivists, curators and evilprofitgrabbingcopyrightholdingcorporations all in the same lump) and puts it into the hands of the people. Never mind that a)information professionals have always grappled with the conflict between access/respect of intellectual property/material preservation, and will nearly always provide the maximum possible access to information, b) information professionals are generally better informed of ethical issues of intellectual property, licences and access, c) "the people" may only be 15-year-old girls tagging photos on myspacebook and d) in my opinion, the only way to create open-source, free and easily accessible information, computer software and fair-priced consumer goods is to allow all people equal opportunities for information use, and to make that information as reliable, easily accessible, and well-organised as possible. To dismiss information science as merely a tool of the elite aimed at disabling access to information runs the risk of that information becoming unaccessible and losing its intellectual credibility.

So. Hating on folksonomies, generally. Having said that, LibraryThing and Delicious are extremely useful tools - LibraryThing can be used by smaller, indepedent libraries who might otherwise not have access to a digitised cataloging system (see this article on flash-mob cataloging as an example), as well as by book enthusiasts and collectors, book-clubs etc. While Delicious' usefulness is not as obvious, it would be easy to recommend it to researches, students or travellers who often used different computers but had a lot of pages they wanted to be able to access easily.