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Original question (Steve McCann, Web4Lib, 4/4/2005)

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

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.

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.

Responses

Recently, someone asked for library sites using Drupal. I just patched Drupal with folksonomy support. The feedback suggests it's gonna be in core: http://drupal.org/node/19697 (Morbus Iff)

That's pretty wild. I'd love to be able to tag items in my faculty's library with keywords, and then not only come back to them months and years later, but share them with others, and see what my friends (or anyone, even if anonymity meant I didn't know who) have been tagging with what. I'd spend hours and hours browsing that. Tie it in with a ratings system and I'd spend hours and hours more. (Ross Singer)

At Georgia Tech we are toying with this. We are trying to create an alternative interface to the OPAC (exporting all the bib records as marcxml - most likely to be transformed to MODS) and trying to create a natual language search on top of it. Included in this would be folksonomic tagging (as well as authoritative LCSH) which could be included in the search (but possibly weighted less than authoritative taxonomies - that will be worked out later). Once enough items have been tagged, we will have the ability to map between folksonomic and LCSH (hopefully) so a user could conceivably (using WAG the Dog or some other form) move back and forth between folksonomic interfaces (del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr, unalog - although possibly more likely CiteULike and Connotea) and the OPAC and local resources.

I figure that by allowing users to save certain items and searches with their own taxonomies, they will also be (inadverdently) opening up the catalog to other discovery methods. Win win, really.

The net can be cast even wider by utilizing this with some sort of metasearch. (Ross Singer)