Folkonomies

1
Folkonomies

• User Tagging and the Library

2
Web 2.0

• New technologies that encourage user input
• YouTube
• Podcasting
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Folkonomies

3
Web 2.0

• Movement away from hierarchy (has been criticized
  as the cult of the amateur)
• Wikis and Blogs have strongest implications for
  Reference
• Folkonomies have the strongest implications for
  Cataloging and Classification

4
Tagging

• AKA collaborative tagging , social
  classification, social indexing, social tagging
• Type of Metadata
• Involves attaching descriptive keywords to
  electronic resources
• Concerned with retrieval, as opposed to other
  types of metadata (administrative, technical,
  rights management, etc.)

5
Author Tagging

• In many cases tags are supplied by authors
• Blogging software usually gives the author the
  ability to apply descriptive keywords to posts.
• Technorati Search engine that searches blog posts
  in real time.

6
Social tagging

• del.icio.us
• LibraryThing
• 43 Things
• StumbleUpon

7
Tag Clouds
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Folkonomies

• Folk Taxonomy
• Descriptive ontology that is generated
  organically as users add tags.
• Bottom up rather than top down
• The greater number of users the greater the
  quality of the tagging system.

9
Advantages

• Inclusiveness. Allows discovery of terms that are
  not part of the mainstream steampunk.
• Timeliness. Controlled vocabularies change
  slowly, and language usage changes quickly,
  especially in the technology fields.
• Serendipity. Can provide alternative paths to
  information retrieval. Can help in retrieving
  grey literature

10
Advantages

• Relevancy - Denotation is easy, keeping up with
  connation is not, difference between movies and
  cinema.
• Non-hierarchical. Formal taxonomies like the LCSH
  have a rigid authority structure resources must
  fit into a broad category.

11
Advantages

• Expectations. Users are getting used to tagging
  as a information retrieval device. 28 of users
  have participated in tagging.
• Participation also increases ownership users buy
  in to system.
• May increase buy in to the Semantic Web (less
  entry costs than even the simplest formal
  metadata schemes)

12
Disadvantages

• Synonyms. No authority control means lack of
  precision in tagging. Cat, Feline, Kitty, all
  possible terms.
• Lack of precision. Structured languages increase
  precision, but require learning standard
  vocabularies, which users are no longer willing
  to do.

13
Disadvantages

• Confusion between broader and narrower terms.
  (Perl vs.. Programming)
• Not objective (although some might say this is
  the point)
• Vandalism and other malicious uses.
• This not an either/or situation

14
Future Developments

• Faceted Tagging (Mefeedia)
• Deep Tagging for media (Veotag)
• Bundling (del.ico.us)

15
Libraries and Tagging

• University of Pennsylvania PennTags
• CiteULike del.ico.us for academic citations.
• Connotea Pulls bib information from formal
  sites
• Stanford del.ico.us site

16
Libraries and Tagging

• Institutional Repositories
• Libraries will continue to use controlled
  languages and professional cataloging user
  tagging is a supplement.