A Survival Guide for Librarians in the Digital Age
A Survival Guide for Librarians in the Digital Age
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science. (from Wikipedia)
Folksonomy is currently understood somewhat narrowly as "tagging." Social sciences and anthropology have long studied "folk classifications"—how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them. Folksonomies work best when a large number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us many people have bookmarked Wikipedia, each with a different set of words to describe it.
Asking users to classify content and generate metadata within online knowledge sharing systems can improve the findability of content, but it has two main problems areas: the taxonomy or metadata structure may be too rigid to support user needs; the overheads of classification are borne by the user, but the group reaps the benefits.
Some references:
Terdiman, Daniel. "Folksonomies Tap People Power." Wired, 2/1/2005.
Social Consequences of Social Tagging
Can Social Tagging Overcome Barriers to Content Classification?
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Sample Uses of Folksonomies or Tagging:
Jots: Collaborative bookmarking system.
