lesson 8 - delicious, and so forth

In this lesson the activity has you look at delicious.com Sharing resources with others and identifying them with tags or, as we in the library world call them, subject keywords is highlighted in this site. How important would consistent, controlled vocabulary need to be in this kind of social networking? How would that work in our library collections?

The importance of a controlled vocabulary is entirely dependent on your goal in using the resource. In the library environment, the goal is to find specific books, or all relevant books, in a formal way. However, the primary use of social networking-style tagging sites like delicious or pintrest is browsing. Searchers are not usually looking for a specific article, or all information on a topic. Rather, they are looking for something that interests them to look at. While uncontrolled vocabulary will not get them the best possible results, it will get them something relevant. Because the amount of information is so incredibly vast, if your needs are casual, something will come up.

For personal use of these sites, in terms of saving ideas for later, or even creating a database for student use, then controlled language becomes important again. However, if we are looking for something specific, where something else similar will not do, then it is probably something we've tagged ourselves rather than something from the social network. It is worth, in this situation to tag carefully so that you can find it again. This is not terribly challenging, though, because you don't need to get the whole community on board, as the article seems to imply.

The article this week seemed terribly concerned that delicious could not replace a formal cataloging system in library. Of course it couldn't, but that isn't what the tool is for.