The Job of Organizing

Organizing books and materials used to be in the domain of professionally trained catalogers and indexers. Now, through Web 2.0, it is in the hands of everyday "folk." What are the implications of this trend for librarians? Also, for additional food for thought, go to your Delicious site and examine your list of tags. In your opinion, are these tags more or less helpful than traditional subject headings?

I see pros and cons for putting the job of organizing books and materials in the hands of non-professionals. Personally I tend to be a perfectionist wanting everything formatted, labeled, and organized consistently; I work well with systems, charts, and checklists! However, the way I organize things may not make sense to other people which would make it difficult for others to find what they are looking for within my system. A label or group I assign to an item may not be the same as what others would think. To this end, Web 2.0 tools that allow everyone input for organization schemes make finding and retrieving items more user-friendly because it uses the intelligence of the masses to assign labels.

For example, searching an academic database using controlled vocabulary can be very efficient--IF the user is familiar with the terms assigned by the cataloger, such as Library of Congress subject headings. When the user only knows one term for an idea or topic and that term yields few results, the user will quickly become frustrated and miss out important information that sitting out there under some different label. On the other extreme are websites and search engines that have little or no sense of organization or classification of information. In this case searching may yield many results, but many will be obscure and the user must manually search for relevant information. In both of these examples, librarians are important to assist the user in finding multiple search terms and filtering irrelevant information. The best case scenario would be to combine the two practices: using a somewhat-controlled vocabulary, allow users to tag items by names and categories that make sense to them. Search engines or databases would then link terms in the controlled vocabulary and display hits from a series of linked terms. Catalogers and indexers still need to monitor and manage the organization to keep it consistent, but users' input would offer valuable information for making searching more successful.

I believe the tags offered by Delicious are more helpful than traditional subject headings because they use common, every day language. Traditional subject headings can be outdated or too technical. What I like about Delicious is that it shows me options frequently used for a particular site while still allowing me to add my own personal tags. This way I can keep my bookmarks organized in a way that makes sense to me while still benefiting from the input of other users.