Tagging, Power Trips, and the Facts

"What do you think of Weinberger's statement on page 89 in the first full paragraph about how the way we organize information limits our vision and gives more power to those who control the organization of information than to those who create it?"

I agree with him, because, as he says on page 91 "Classification is a power struggle - it is political - because the first two orders of order require that there be a winner."

That is why the web - especially the envisioned Semantic Web - is so exciting. It allows individual creators so much more power, to not just publish their material, but to organize it also - via tags, or which site they put it on, or simply by throwing it out into the world, willy-nilly. Their works are not limited by geography or format; they are not catalogued and put away on a shelf; they are always available.

The PennTags project was interesting, in that some people had many projects (one individual had 81!); others had only one. I liked the way that the site was simple and cleanly arranged; and I liked the way it put the most-used tags up as a heading. (But why Namibia? Really?) I think that using tags for library catalogues would be a fantastic way to spread the word, but it could not replace authority-controlled professional cataloguing; the latter is necessary to authenticate the data involved.

Look at it this way. I do a lot of family history, aka genealogy. I started when I was in my early 20s, and dutifully followed the "best-practice" of interviewing one's oldest living relatives about what they remember (or mis-remember), and then tracking that information down through vital and other government records. When I started, there wasn't any significant internet genealogy databases, so nearly everything I found had to be gotten via forms, fees, and the copier. It was a lot of hours in the county courthouse reading crappy handwriting, but it was worth it.

Do you know what I discovered? Almost all the data - the vital statistics such as dates, complete names, places - I gathered in the interviews was incorrect!  Many times, the actual vital statistics recorded in official records proved that the person whom I interviewed actually lied, or covered up, some sort of family skeleton.  In the most memorable case, poor Great-Uncle Otto was not dead, as I and many other family members had been told, but had actually been living as a hermit in Arkansas for over 50 years.  50 years of denying his existence!  I was incredulous.

Interviewing relatives for genealogical information is like tagging. What they don't say, what they do remember accurately, and how they say it, says more about the event than the actual words they use. Interviewing gives you a fascinating insight into how their brain works, what emotions they felt, and what events impacted them the most. BUT, in my family, you never get the facts. You never get the truth. And the truth - like an accurate library catalogue - gives you the framework to flesh out the tags, or anecdotes.  It explains so much - like why Great-Grandma Steinman said, with a sigh, "We sparked too much", when asked how she met Great-Grandpa Steinman.  (The truth being that she was pregnant when they got married.)

So, to me, the two types of categorizing (authority-controlled, authenticated cataloguing and patron-defined tags) go hand-in-hand.  Together, they build a richer, more detailed, more accurate picture of what the library has to offer.  I would highly encourage any library - even a children's library, because children do see the world so differently that tags created by children for children would add so much to the search experience for them - to allow patrons to tag items.