Group items tagged

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1]

There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others’. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.

I used some of my break time to further delve into what’s happening with social bookmarking and tagging activity. These are interesting technologies, and I’m wondering if much exploration is taking place at academic libraries. There are a few academic librarians out there who have caught on to the use of social bookmarking software and tagging - and a few are actively promoting it on their blogs. For example, Ellyssa Kroski, a reference librarian at Columbia University, discusses tagging and folksonomies at her blog Infotangle. But at the library, not individual, level we are only beginning to explore how to exploit this technology to promote user access to resources and services.