"Survival of the fittest tag" by Alexis Wichowski

As a cataloger myself (or should I say "future cataloger" until I get my degree), I always find it interesting when the subject of social tagging comes up as it relates to the use of controlled vocabularies in libraries, such as Library of Congress subject headings.

Wichowski starts off her article by stating that "unidentified and unorganized content, however useful it may be, is at risk [of] being rendered unfindable, and thus obsolete" in the new information environment brought about by the internet ... Of course, this type of scenario still existed when our information resources were limited to books and journals: if a patron can't find a piece of information that they're looking for, then - to that patron - that information simply does not exist. That's where cataloging would come in, to make that information easily identifiable via the assignment of subject headings (the idea is rather comically represented in this 1947 short film, a personal favorite of mine).

However, now that the "modern information environment holds far more information than specialists to identify it", and the advent of folksonomies has transformed everyday people into "content organizers" (boy, sounds like us catalogers are out of a job!) the argument usually goes - at least in many studies that I've read - that there is simply no need for the adoption of a controlled vocabulary within the online world when we have the patrons doing the tagging for us.

I would argue that social tagging doesn't have to replace things like subject headings; in my opinion, this is not an either-or scenario. Instead, social tagging can be seen as a supplementary resource to help make the process of finding information easier ... In essence, social tagging is just another access point created for our patrons, to help them attempt to locate exactly what they are looking for.

That's why I was happy to see Wichowski point out a study which stated that "when folksonomies were combined with the directories with controlled vocabularies, precision and recall results were higher than in searches using the controlled vocabularies alone" ... As I said, this doesn't have to be an either-or scenario (discard the old in order to embrace the new); both systems - folksonomies and controlled vocabularies - can be used in tandem to enhance the information finding experience for the user.

Of course, one thing to remember in all of this is that no information-organization system is perfect; Wichowski admits as much when she states that most (relatively new) folksonomies are "immature, uncoordinated, and have much to learn from their predecessors."

On the one hand, "amateur" content organizers can tag information with easily recognizable terms, written in everyday language that patrons can understand (many subject heading terms can admittedly be a little bit on the technical side) ... And yet, since there is no specific training or rules associated with folksonomies (hence the "amateur" status), these newly-minted content organizers don't always get things right.

For example, tagging by everyday users can lead to incorrect/misleading results (many YouTube video are labelled "librarian" when they are really referring to "bookstore owner" or even just "pretty girl wearing glasses"), or results that just aren't very helpful (a Flickr image of the Egyptian Sphinx could be labelled "summer vacation" or "1997" or "digital camera" or any other combination of words except for "Egyptian" and "Sphinx") ... That is why it can be advantageous to supplement folksonomies with controlled vocabularies, rather than just abandon the idea entirely, and this is something that those within the library profession should keep at the forefront of the argument.