Thingamabrarian

An interesting interview with Tim Spalding, creator of Librarything.com, in Library Journal. Particularly of interest, is his discussion of tags. I've mentioned them from time to time to other librarians, and the temptation seems to be - oh, no, what happens to controlled vocabulary, users won't tag things with useful information, etc. Except that I don't really see it that way - particularly with a large user base tagging items.

I also was interested in this link from the LibraryThing blog, where it seems that Tim is working with library OPACs to integrate LibraryThing data into the catalogs. This could make tagging much more useful because it would be using data already available and from a large group of users, into a setting where the controlled vocab (i.e. subject headings) are still available.

The largest push currently in libraries is to pay attention to the users. Frankly that makes me ask the question, why haven't we been doing that all along? The answer, of course, is probably wound up in the history of libraries going way back to the Monk's and the fact that normal people didn't have access to this type of information, but it's a different world now. Let's not live in the dark ages.