Weinberger's statement that "order often hides more than it reveals", is one that is all too true and all too challenging for the world of libraries. Organization by limited terms makes discovering relationships between objects or people impossible to fully grasp.
[In my own experience right now- organizing wedding invitations- we could organize the ways in which we stuff the invitations based on family/ friends, towns, wedding party/ guests, those invited to the ceremony and reception/ those invited to the reception, and further to those invited to the rehearsal- there are individual invitations that at any point could be in 5 of the eight categories and when it comes to stuffing the envelopes with the appropriate pieces of information it is not yet entirely clear to me what the most efficient order of operations may be.]
All too often we take for granted the accepted systems of organization and rely on them to inform us of relationships between things. But, there is a great deal to be gained from allowing individual organization methods to influence our online library databases. Just this past week, for another LIS course, I had to investigate and evaluate the relative efficiency and user-friendliness of two similar websites. I chose two familiar libraries. In my exploration of the sites I was very frustrated by my inherent desire to browse and how nearly impossible it was to do in the online catalog systems. I would seek to find suspenseful, dystopian fiction, and come up with nothing simply because the words I choose to use to describe the types of books I enjoy were not the words that were used when adding the books to the catalog system.
In desperation to try learn what search terms might yield the results I was hoping for, I searched for a related title (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)and examined its particular subject keywords: Survival, television programs, interpersonal relations, and contests. Four keywords- and words which I would not have thought of using. Under local subjects: books made in to movies, Buckeye Children's Book Award, suggested books for teens, and Teen's Top Ten 2009. Again, four keywords- one's I would never use to describe materials I was interested in finding.
Then, I saw below: "Community Tags," and found a couple of useful tags which might in fact lead me down the right path: "apocalypse" and "books you might stay up all night to finish". While not entirely useful for my intended search, seeing the incorporation of patron suggested tags did bring me some level of hope for the future of this particular library's catalog searching.
The process of allowing the creation of community suggested tags for the books in the catalog system, while it may seem catastrophically disorganized and "miscellaneous," would in the end benefit the patrons the most. Allowing the public to sort and organize their books can broaden the field for those who wish to browse for books in a digital format. The use of these community tags puts the power into the hands of the readers to say what the books are about- not a lone cataloger, not the author, and not the publisher. Allowing this kind of flexibility gives readers the opportunity to relate their experiences with the materials to the larger community of readers and expand the meaning of the materials. As we all know, when any two people read a book, what they take away from it will not be the same. Allowing readers to reflect back on the books and expand the search terms might allow other readers the opportunity to discover books they may not otherwise find.
Adopting more and more user tags, can only help the library system by increasing meaningful searches by library patrons. Like Flickr, the more tags applied to the individual items in the catalog search, the more reliable and useful the search results will become. If 25 people had read The Hunger Games and described it as "dystopian" perhaps search results for dystopian fiction would have been able to yield more overall results for me in my individual pursuits. Increasing the number of tags allows libraries to expand the language used by readers in order to bridge the gap between the librarian's personal context, the reader's personal context, and the context in which the book's information exists.
Projects like: the PennTags project, are able to demonstrate the usefulness of group sharing and tagging. The relative usefulness of searching by tags is unlimited, I can only hope that the user interface for such systems might become less overwhelming over time. Visiting the PennTags site and taking in the information is daunting right now, but organizing the site into something more visually pleasing could be yet one more step to organizing and creating barriers to the data that we are working so hard to move away from.
For now, I believe I will have to stick to the WorldCat website where they are incorporating the use of tags on a larger scale than my local library. Using WorldCat I found the search term I was looking for, refined the search further and have saved some of my results to look for in my local library when I get the chance.
Happy hunting!
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