Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Helen’s kick-started a debate on librarians and tagging over at The Business of Knowing that’s been picked up by Steven Dale on his blog Dissident who ends his post by asking “I’ve seen very few  articles/comments/blogs from Librarians in support of social bookmarking. Someone prove me wrong?”

On the train back from the HLG Study Day today,  came across an excellent summary of some of the issues around tagging in the sample copy of Health Information and Libraries Journal we were given:

It is important to remember that folksonomies are built from the bottom up; they are built by ordinary people, not professional indexers or librarians. They are democratic and inclusive, but as such they provide a snapshot of current users’ behaviour and preferences, and they are not stable or controlled like formal vocabularies [12].

As social bookmarking is open to all, there is no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged. This can lead to inconsistent tags or otherwise poor use of tags, incomplete, skewed, inappropriate or pejorative descriptions of resources. Those preferring top-down taxonomies argue that an agreed set of tags enables more efficient indexing and searching of content [39]. Critics suggest folksonomies are characterized by flaws that formal classification systems are designed to eliminate, including polysemy, synonyms, and plural words. In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, the ‘meta-noise’ which burdens users and decreases the system’s information retrieval utility [39].

Barsky and Purdon [12] are not suggesting removal of the traditional subject taxonomies / controlled vocaublary use in medical and health-related resource indexing for enhamced information retrieval, but instead improving on these by allowing users to tag their favourite materials for all to use. It is important to remember that folksonomies and tagging are still nascent activities, and new features are constantly emerging [12].

(Boulos, Maged N. Kamel and Wheeler, Steve (2007) The emerging Web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of social technoligies in health and health care education. Health Information and Libraries Journal 24(1):9-10).

There’s much I’d like to say about this, in favour of the librarian- and especially the cataloguer-tagger, but for today I just want to put this quotation out there …

Refs from the article

(Direct quotation, retaining original number sequence) 

[12] Barsky E. & Purdon M. Introducing Web 2.0: social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. Journal of Canadian Health Library Association 2006, 27, 7-8.

[39] Wikipedia. Folksonomy. November 2006. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy (accessed 29 December 2006).