[Web4lib] Re: Future of libraries

Tue Jul 8 10:28:32 EDT 2008

My 2 cents on tagging:
Tagging is a self-serving activity.  As Tim mentioned, people tag to 
organize their own, personal information. A site like Del.icio.us is 
first and formost a way to organize personal bookmarks.  The fact that 
it's a pretty good index for quality content on the Web is a wonderful 
byproduct.  People will not (and should not) tag for the "greater good" 
as it's akin to swimming upstream. 

Even if the UI and "workflow" put the tagging functionality in the 
optimal place for me to appropriately tag library books, what incentive 
do I have to do so?  Sure, you would get a few more people doing it, but 
not enough to really make any kind of difference.  LibraryThing has been 
generally successful when it comes to tagging because people are mainly 
organizing their own stuff, and the numbers are there to make collective 
intelligence  meaningful.

This idea is discussed more eloquently and in greater detail here:
http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/

-Shaun Ellis

-- 
Shaun Ellis
Web Applications Programmer
Rutgers University Libraries
sdellis at rci.rutgers.edu
732/445-5896

Tim Spalding wrote:

>>Hi Tim, somehow I've missed conversation on library tagging programs failing.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm going to respond at some length to this--much length. I apologize
>to the 90% of you who are now hitting "next" on your email program. :)
>
>As Karen noted, tagging has recently been "tacked on" to various OPACs
>in this mechanical, thoughtless way. I at least have heard over and
>over the feature is virtually unused. If anyone can show otherwise,
>I'm all ears.
>
>To my knowlede, however, the largest, longest-running catalog tagging
>projects remains PennTags, UPenn's tagging project, started at the end
>of 2005.
>
>I just grabbed the "all tags" page on PennTags, ran it through Excell
>and reached a total of 59,101 tags. Of these, it appears that only a
>minority relate to catalog records; PennTags allows users to tag web
>pages and other resources, which is a strength, certainly, but does
>not speak to whether in-catalog tagging works.
>
>This aside, even if all 59,000 were OPAC tags, these numbers compare
>quite unfavorably with LibraryThing's 37.4 million tags. Indeed,
>LibraryThing adds more tags every day (about 65,000) than PennTags has
>ever added.
>
>I mention this not to bring people down, or to crow about how big
>LibraryThing is--in fact, still quite small--but because when it comes
>to tags, *numbers matter*: Everything that works about tagging works
>better with numbers, and most of the problems are ammeliorated by
>numbers too.
>
>When a book has one tag, or even ten, you know little for certain.
>Simple idiocy or malicious intent aside, tagging is an uncertain,
>personal thing. But when books map to hundreds or thousands of tags,
>and tags map to hundreds or thousands of books, patterns
>emerge--called a "folksonomy"--that provides some of the power of
>traditional classification and can significantly aid in discovery. You
>can look at a book and see a wide range of tags, sized by how often
>they are applied. You can browser a tag and see a list of books that
>is comprehensive and sorted by relevance. The good stuff rises and the
>bad stuff sinks. You can even combine tags with each other--eg.,
>LibraryThing can combine "wwii," "france" and "nonfiction" for a
>decent list of nonfiction books about France during World War II--and
>even maps to formal ontologies, as LibraryThing does.
>
>I can hardly find an example that doesn't seem unfair, so I will chose
>one that's typical. In the UPenn catalog, the _Great Gatsby_ has been
>tagged twice by one user--as "great" and as "gatsby."
>
>On LibraryThing, the same book has been tagged 15,891 times. Among
>these, both "great" and "gatsby" appear--5 and 26 times respectively,
>but they are dwarfed by others, "jazz age" (152), "lost generation"
>(48), "long island" (52), "american literature" (392), "wealth" (53),
>etc. The result, together with all the other books these tags connect
>you to, is a rich tapestry of meaning. What are the most significant
>jazz age books? What about jazz age New York? Etc.
>
>Even when low-frequency tagging is dead-on, it's still leaves you
>alone. For example, Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ has
>been tagged twice on PennTags, the very correct "historiography" and
>"history_of_science." But both were applied by one user, who has also
>applied each and every instance of those tags. The user--a heroic
>individual responsible for fully 7% of PennTags--has surely put in a
>lot of work, but do you really want one person's slice of these
>topics, probably gathered in the course of a single research project?
>Isn't formal classification--comprehensive, thorough and intent on
>objective analysis--infinitely superior to one anonymous user's
>happenstance tags?
>
>On LibraryThing by contrast, you are never alone--historiography has
>798 users, and history of science 1,145. Each unwraps a small world of
>connections. Kuhn's masterwork alone has drawn "history of science"
>fully 130 times--and it can also be found through appropriate tags
>like "philosophy of science" (185), "paradigm" (40), "paradigm shift"
>(12), Wissenschaftstheorie (4). Even if the tags themselves don't
>interest you, LibraryThing has done the math and discovered that
>"history of science" is highly correlated with a set of LCSHs--e.g.,
>
>	Science -- History (473)
>	Knowledge, Theory of (223)
>	Science -- Methodology (150)
>	Science -- Social aspects (96)
>
>--all of which have bearing on Kuhn's work, but only one of which is
>listed among its LCSHs. Only numbers can give you these sorts of
>correlations.
>
>Most importantly, even with 37 million tags, I am fully aware that,
>because of the long-tail effect, huge swaths of the bibliographic
>universe are still unserved or poorly served by tagging on
>LibraryThing. This will still be true at 370 million tags, but less
>so.
>
>To Karen's point, that tagging might succeed if put elsewhere in the
>"workflow" of the library patron, for example at return not check-in,
>I have some sympathy. At the least the "ignorance problem" is
>resolved--the patron has probably read the book or seen the movie.
>
>But return is not a natural "computer time," and the explanation still
>fronts the idea of tagging as a "feature." Tagging and other social
>activities are more than that. They are social phenomena, and like all
>social software phenomena, a complex alchemy of personal benefit and
>social reinforcement. Just as you can't put a basketball on the ground
>and expect a basketball game to spring to life (similarly: a matress,
>orgy) folksonomy requires much more than a "tag" field to take off.
>
>Tagging on LibraryThing took off because our members have a strong
>desire to organize large collections of their own books, and because
>participating in the tagging system, once it gathered steam, became
>its own draw. Despite its success, tagging is still done by fewer than
>50% of users, it tends to start in a big burst of activity, and it
>generally begins when a user has more than 200 books in their personal
>library. These observations should dim the light on library tagging
>somewhat, since the impulse to organize returned items is less
>powerful, and returns happen in dribs and drabs.
>
>Personally, I think tagging in catalogs should be looked at primarily
>as a discovery mechanism--and tags should be drawn from elswhere, if
>necessary, to achieve critical mass. That is, of course, what
>LibraryThing sells, so you can discount this if you like. If libraries
>want to bypass outside sources, however, and develop their own
>folksonomies, they have to get serious about combining forces to
>achieve mass, and about understanding social software as something
>more than a set of "features."
>
>Tim
>
>
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