{"id":25,"date":"2009-05-08T17:16:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T17:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sclacats.wordpress.com\/?p=25"},"modified":"2009-05-08T17:16:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T17:16:30","slug":"cats-program-at-long-island-library-conference-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/cats-program-at-long-island-library-conference-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"CATS Program at Long Island Library Conference 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

On May 7, 2009, CATS sponsored a program at the Long Island Library Conference titled \u201cLooking Beyond the Clouds: Enhancing Library Services through Social Tagging.\u201d\u00a0 The program was presented by Emily Clasper of Suffolk Cooperative Library System.\u00a0 It was a great program, and was attended by about 150 people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although users of services such as Twitter, Flickr and Delicious may find tagging to be second nature by this time, many of us are still not quite sure what it is that tagging represents.\u00a0 Tagging is starting to show up now in many places that librarians might not expect to see it\u2014on the New York Times website for instance, or on the online version of the Suffolk County Catalog.\u00a0 The bottom line is that tagging is here to stay, and while it does have its drawbacks, it also has a number of positive features.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emily did a good job of explaining how all of this fits in to a librarian\u2019s world.\u00a0 She started by explaining the differences between a taxonomy (we\u2019re all familiar with how this works) and a folksonomy (this is where tagging comes into play).\u00a0 Whereas taxonomy is authoritative, hierarchical, and highly structured, folksonomy has no formal structure, is user-generated and evolves out of consensus.\u00a0 As information professionals, we probably tend to think that detailed, controlled, structured descriptions are the way to go, that might not always be the case.\u00a0 We all know of the difficulties that users can have to use a controlled vocabulary such as Library of Congress subject headings.\u00a0 Although keyword searching can help with that, it\u2019s not always enough.\u00a0 A user-generated set of tags could make it much easier for library users to find what they\u2019re looking for using vocabulary they\u2019re familiar with. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Another important reason to consider turning to user-generated tags to describe online content has to do with the tremendous amount of new information being added to the web all of the time.\u00a0 Each week, millions of new messages, videos, and pictures are added to millions of sites by users from all around the world.\u00a0 There is simply no way for an authoritative body to classify all of this new information.\u00a0 Thus, enabling content creators to classify their own information, while perhaps not a perfect solution, at least provides some means of intelligent description.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emily finished up her presentation with a discussion of some of the emerging trends in tagging.\u00a0 These include \u201cautomanual folksonomies\u201d (combining automated and manual tagging), geo-tagging, and mobile tagging.\u00a0 Altogether, it was an excellent and thought-provoking session on the subject.\u00a0 Click here to view<\/a><\/strong> Emily\u2019s Power Point presentation<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 7, 2009, CATS sponsored a program at the Long Island Library Conference titled \u201cLooking Beyond the Clouds: Enhancing Library Services through Social Tagging.\u201d\u00a0 The program was presented by Emily Clasper of Suffolk Cooperative Library System.\u00a0 It was a great program, and was attended by about 150 people. Although users of services such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scla.net\/cats\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}