Things: Tagging and Name Authorities

I had great fun tagging my blog entries thus far 'Hurrah' for things I enjoyed and can see the point of and 'Bizarre' for things I am less convinced about.

Well now I confess to having enjoyed reading Clay Shirky's essay, 'Ontology is Overrated', very much indeed. It is good to think about such things from a different perspective. I particularly found the sections on signal loss and 'smeariness' of tagging enlightening.

I should perhaps add that I am an archivist rather than a librarian so perhaps my approach is a little different. Each collection requires an individual hierachical structure (classification scheme) to be created for it as the material is unique. So in the archival world I guess there are fewer issues with signal loss because one is always attempting to create a scheme based on what is in front of you now rather than trying to force an items into an existing set of headings someone else set up a long time ago. Indexing or addition of name authorities is often viewed as a non-essential activity but I feel this may change as more online thesauri are developed. I'll add a link here to an interesting article on indexing in the latest Society of Archivist's magazine when the e-edition is made available.

There is certainly an issue about critical mass with user led tagging. And perhaps, dare I even say it, a collaborative effort rather than an 'us or them' approach might work best with library tagging projects.