Organizing books and materials used to be in the domain of professionally trained catalogers and indexers. Now, through Web 2.0, it is in the hands of everyday "folk." What are the implications of this trend for librarians? Also, for additional food for thought, go to your Delicious site and examine your list of tags. In your opinion, are these tags more or less helpful than traditional subject headings?
I think that organizing now is similar to the way that Wikipedia works - it has become a global "think tank" as opposed to something structured and following an exact set of rules that few people know. Honestly, other than librarians, how many people can tell you what the difference is between Dewey Decimal number 918.04 and 981.04? Even then, unless you use these numbers a lot, most librarians would have to look up what the numbers after the decimal point represent (918.04 are books on South America travel and 981.04 is 19th century Brazilian history). Tagging though, is much less librarian-ish and much more Barnes and Noble's-ish. And after all, who doesn't love a good bookstore?
Honestly, I find social bookmarking tags easier to navigate. Ask anyone who knows me about my book collection - I could NEVER sort it by a format like the Dewey Decimal system. Most of my collection is by genre except if I have a lot of an author - then there's a group just for that specific author (so, I have a bunch of sci/fi and fantasy books, but all my Peter S. Beagle books are grouped together as opposed to being alphabetized by title). This means that, while my boyfriend can't find a thing in my collection, I have no problem at all. It's the same with social bookmarking. I can organize my sites my own way and others can view, borrow, and find sites that I like. And that can, in turn, help lead users to more (potentially useful) sites.
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