[Students-l] What do you think "Folksonomies" in the library

[Jenny Guo]

Hello, I am a current student in University of Denver LIS program. I am working on my cataloging assignment and would love to hear your thoughts on an article that I read recently - “Folksonomies in the library: their impact on user experience, and their implications for the work of librarians". It's about the implication of folksonomies in the library. In the article, the author discusses the following four questions through his literature review and research: 
1.	How have folksonomies been incorporated into libraries? 
2.	Doe the use of tag clouds and folksonomies add value to the user’s experience of the library catalogue? 
3.	Is it possible for folksonomies to supplant traditional “top-down” taxonomies? 
4.	What implications does the use of folksonomies have for the work of librarians? 

As we all know, the advantage that folksonomies have is that they can reflect users’ language, needs and conceptions of information, rather than requiring them to yield to centrally-imposed top-down system.Ironically their advantages are also their shortcomings, which are a result of their lack semantic and linguistic control. So the author thinks it's hard that folksonomies replace traditional top-down classification schemes. But the benefits that folksonomies can provide cannot be completely discounted. So the future implications for librarians is coexistence of both formal taxonomies and user-created categories. In addition, based on Peterson’s study, there was very little overlap between the library of congress subject headings and folksonomies. In literature the coexistence allows them to counteract each other’s flaws, facilitating both discovery and collocation. But because the effectiveness of folksonomies is reliant on the contribution of a large number of diverse individuals, librarians have responsibility to maintain the balance between structured classification and ad-hoc categorization so that users will be able to reap the benefits of both.

Thank you,
Jenny Guo



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