When the forefather of librarianship, Melvil Dewey, devised the Dewey Decimal Classification system, his goal was to systematically categorize all of human knowledge. For much of the twentieth century, this ambitious intellectual endeavour remained the goals of librarians in classifying and cataloging books and metadata by decimal numbers and keywords.
Other library classification systems such as the DDC and Library of Congress Classification (LCC), and the National Library of Medicine Classification systems continue to dominate libraries throughout the world.
However, with the advent of the world wide web, much of the staples of library information organization are being challenged and are undergoing drastic developments, primarily with folksonomies as the prime culprit.
What Are Folksonomies?
Folksonomies are based on social tagging, which is the collaborative process of creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize web content. Unlike traditional classification systems in which subjects must be rigidly fit into categories according to the expert who creates it, folksonomies are generated also by creators and consumers of the content. Even the term folksonomies is revealing in its etymological roots, with “folk” representing the bottom-up approach of mass creation, and “taxonomy” still indicating a structured information model.
Whereas librarians are used to categorizing information according to subjects using controlled vocabulary, folksonomies overturn this practice, as it encourages users to freely chose keywords and “tag” them as their own. What results is a bottom-up democratic process of classification rather than a top-down hierarchical way of categorizing created by experts.
The following are all programs that use folksonomies:
- Flickr
- Delicious
- Wikipedia
The use of folksonomies comes with some advantages and disadvantages.
The Pro’s and Con’s of Folksonomies
To librarians whose work mainly involves gathering, organizing, and disseminating anything that has to do with information and collections, folksonomies offers a double-edged sword. While its uncontrolled nature is essentially chaotic, full of problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well-developed controlled vocabularies do not have, folksonomies encourage users to organize information in their own ways that are highly practical to individual needs and vocabularies.
Examples – Wikipedia in Action
Wikipedia is one of the earliest examples of folksonomies in action and perhaps shows us that many might not even have been aware of the power of social tagging even when we have been using it for so many years. In Wikipedia, any user can create a “key term” simply by running his or her key over a term and hyperlinking it to a webpage.
With enough users hyperlinking their own terms, sooner or later, there will be a regularity to certain key terms being used over and over again. With that, the use of folksonomies result in a somewhat standardized set of vocabularies that are not the creation of any experts, but from a mass collaboration of users. For example, whereas the Dewey Decimal system limits key terms such as Tylenol under drugs medication, folksonomies break down categorical silos and allows any key term “Paracetamol,” “acetaminophen,” and “Tylenol” to be cross-linked in any way to lead to each other.
Web 2.0 and Folksonomies
Folksonomies realize what Web 2.0 is all about. Web 2.0 is a term that information professionals and librarians have been grappling for years, but interestingly, it fits into the library paradigm incredibly well as it in many ways challenges years of long held ideas of librarianship and information organization, yet allows librarians to find new ways to better serve its users.
Librarians to the Charge?
Librarians’ main work involves organizing information, be it in electronic and print form. What social tagging and folksonomies have done is force librarians to adjust their mindset and to offer new ways to build library catalogues and websites.
They don’t necessarily need the Dewey system anymore; some have even charged Dewey as outdated and anachronistic, and too Euro-centric for its own good. Times have changed, and with that, the web has changed the way we perceive and organize the world as well.
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