Social book marking and folksonomy

Question to ponder: "Sharing resources with others and identifying them with tags or, as we in the library world call them, subject keywords is highlighted in [www.delicious.com]. How important would consistent, controlled vocabulary need to be in this kind of social networking? How would that work in our library collections?


Social bookmarking is something that is relatively new to me, and I have yet to use it to it's full potential. I have up till recently used the sites Delicous and also Diigo to organize and annotate websites for my own organizational purposes, not for sharing or for any social purposes. I have this week started to use a Delicious account to collect links for my students to use in researching a historical figure for a biography/ timeline project. I was able to have students find my links and use them to start researching their assigned historical figure, I was able to follow students Delicious feeds and see what they have found. I was able to search "biographies" and "biography" and came up with a good number of sites (132 pages worth) that had not come either through the Webpath express search (which brought up a large number of individual biographies- all from biography.com) I had tried through the library catalog or through a simple google search. So far so good. I like it. Unlike some other responses I have seen on this topic I did not come across any inappropriate sites tagged with those tags either.

Alireza Noruzi, in Folksonomies: (Un)Controlled Vocabulary? states that "Index terms
should be checked for accuracy and acceptability in reference tools, such as dictionaries,
encyclopedias, thesauri and classification schemes (ISO 1985)." Now we know that the 13 year old students in my class are not going to be checking their tags in a reference book unless they are doing so in class with the teacher. If they are tagging links for their own use they will tag things that suits their own needs like "socials project" or something similar just as I have done of my own links in my Diigo account.

On the surface it seems like having a lack of systematization in the tagging language, especially if it were done in the library collection would be a problem. I see two arguements for such a system, perhaps as an add on to traditional subject heading categorization. The first is that students are far more likely to choose tags that are logical to students and these may be the types of search terms that other students are more likely to use. It could even help to collocate existing items in the collection. Secondly it seems to me that the tags will tend towards a mean of the most logical useful and pertinent tags. The more people tag a site, the more  useful
the suggestions offered by the website will become. Additional users can create different tags for previously tagged sites (or correctly spelled tags) over time. People will, when given a list of possible tags, will tend to choose the more applicable ones. Sites that are not good quality will not get retagged, and will not have as many tags. The collection will be improved over time in an organic manner.

Consistent and controlled vocabulary would not be essential because the natural language used by students would be searchable in addition to any subject heading created by the cataloger when the item was first added to the catalog.  In a library collection, if students could tag the entries for books, in addition to just writing reviews or creating resource lists, this may prove of benefit to other students, in addition to teachers and the librarian, especially in terms of collocation and keeping track of which resources are proving useful for which assignments and projects, especially those used in the library that are not being checked out.Both digital and concrete collections may then be better utilized by students and teachers alike.