Folksonomy - < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy > may not as effective if looked from professional angle. However, its big plus point is that - it works!!!. Take for example of http://del.icio.us - it allows people to save bookmarks on their server. And to allow organization of these bookmarks people can classify them broadly and loosely by some words. This actually allows ordinary people to build their own personal libraries of Internet Resources. They Select and Classify resources. They can use these whenever they want. Story does not end here – it actually begins. They can also share their libraries with others by just referring a simple URL. The end product is collection of Internet Resources, which the users have themselves selected collectively and classified collectively. Of course the individual items in the collection get ranked automatically based on how many people have book marked (Tagged). There is something that computer / Internet professionals and companies over smart [unintentionally of course] us in our own game. Few examples are - Yahoo (Started as a Classification of Internet Resources by Humans); Google – used the citation indexing to produce Internet Search Engine; Dublin Core beats MARC and other Standards in simplicity; term "Metadata" beats indexing etc. "Tagging" will soon replace the term classification. Perhaps we lack Simplicity in our approach. How often we fight over which standard / tool is best? Don't we disregard users' needs and bulldozer it with our jargon? We have always talked of collaboration (library cooperation) for decades. But however such practical examples we have? The best future strategy in my opinion would be to help each individual to build his own personal but shareable library. And such practice should be termed as "Social Librarianship" --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in On 28/04/06, Suvarsha Walters <suvarsha@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> wrote:

Hi,

That is interesting.

I remember my first classes in MLISc, when we were learning in 'Knowledge Organization'. Prof. B.V. Rajashekar (one of the excellent teachers I have been fortunate to study under) used to tell us that every child learns by classifying.

For example, first a child would identifiy all four legged animals as 'dogs' (because she has come across a dog earlier). Then she will learn that not all are 'dogs' but there are 'cats' and 'goats' too, thus classifying them according to their features and tagging them differently.

I witness this happening everyday with my two year old kid.

If 'classification' and 'tagging' are so fundamental, then I suppose there is a librarian in everyone. But the problem is, we all have studied in differnt 'schools', haven't we?

I wonder how effective folksonomy is. We could call it 'collective librarianship'?

with regards,

Suvarsha *********************************************************************** Suvarsha Walters, Project Assistant, National Centre for Science Information Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560 012 INDIA Ph (Off): 080-23600271 / 22932511 Ph (Mobile): 98458 33694 E-mail: suvarsha_w@yahoo.com suvarsha@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

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On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, Sukhdev Singh wrote:

...

...

. A "folksonomy" is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web

Well - a librarian is most concerned with selecting and organizing information. But that is exactly what everybody in doing on web in a phenomenon called Folksonomy < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy pages, online photographs, and Web links.

This is because everybody has a small "Librarian" embedded inside < http://sukhdev.blogspot.com/2006/04/everybody-has-librarian-inside.html

...

.

Any comments please!!

--Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in

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