library websites and folksonomies

[Steve McCann]

I'm curious if anyone is thinking about incorporating some type of
folksonomy [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy ] or other type
of social software into their libraries' website or, dare I say, OPAC?

There's an interesting podcast at IT Discussions by Clay Shirky of
NYU, who is advocating moving in this direction.
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html

Some of the assertions presented: 
- Ontologies are a 300 year old hack, a shelf-based paradigm.
- Ontologies may be on the wrong side of the "Does the world make
sense or do we make sense of the world?" question.
- and others

My impression is that implementations such as http://del.icio.us/ are
fascinating, but not really that useful over the long-term since terms
are not static and can't be analyzed over time. Since Google's page
rank algorithms are essentially "social" and very successful, there
may be something to the idea of adopting a social-software approach in
some way. Maybe a citation analysis algorithm which queries an
organization's institutional repository? Any thoughts are appreciated.
-- 

Steve McCann

Digital Projects Librarian
Mansfield Library
The University of Montana
steve.mccann at umontana.edu
"permanently beta"