Tag in the Dark

Tagging is the buzz on the Internets these days. Tagging is assigning words or phrases to a information item. Flickr is all tagging crazy. Amzon is experimenting with tagging through 43 Things. Lots of blogs use tagging to categorize posts (including Soapnix!). Its pretty exciting stuff and its nice to see people are into it but the idea that free text tagging is the answer to real information retrieval needs is just silly.

This article in Newsweek perfectly illustrates this wrong headed attitude. The writer clearly doesn’t understand how libraries have dealt with information retrieval. The Dewey Decimal system is not a cataloging scheme it’s just a classification scheme for placing books on a shelf. Similar books are located together for so that you can collocate similar materials. I won’t even get into his bogus Frederick the Great example. But the real strength of the library is the catalog not the shelf.

I’m a librarian and my job consists mostly of building and maintain a taxonomy and tagging sites on the intranet of a local mega-corporation. The multi-user uncontrolled free text tagging is an inherently flawed system that is easily corruptible. For instance what’s to stop me going on Flickr and tagging photos of my Lt. Picard action figure with the term dog? Ideally traditional library ideas of authority control can be used to enhance these systems and help connect searches on canine with things tagged with dog. Maybe blending the old and the new will help improve information retrieval.