Organization Monkey

it seems that i keep bumping into a polarizing topic of conversation; the issue of uncontrolled social tagging in environments that were previously controlled. in the past month i’ve been following a conversation thread on an email forum about social tagging in a museum environment (see http://steve.museum/pipermail/discuss/2007-June/thread.html to follow the thread on “‘incorrect’ social tagging”). based on the discussions it seems that the museum environment would welcome such interaction with their patrons, only trying to figure out a way to have the act of adding tags be a productive activity. i’ve nodded my head in silent agreement as i’ve been reading this thread, as it seems to me that including patrons in the process of organizing a collection has a real result in that then the collection is valued and used by the patron (i.e., the reason we build collections).  the people writing on this thread seem genuinely interested in figuring out how to harness this social tool.

on the other side of the conversation, surprisingly enough, has been in libraries.  i was recently asked by an authorities librarian if i saw any value in social tagging.  i responded that i thought we should open our library catalogs to allow our users to mark records with rankings, comments, and keywords.  let’s just say my comment was not well received.  and then today as i listened to the webcast on ‘economics and organization of bibliographic data,’ a participant said that if the library catalog was opened to this sort of activity that it would need to be “controlled.”

these conversations spur me to think about the ego of the collecting organizations, and the value they put on “being right” or “correct.” why do you suppose the museum world seems to be welcoming to social tools, whereas libraries resist them?  do you suppose we can shift the process of thought so that “being incorrect” or “fallible” has a value for libraries?  do libraries always have to be “right” to still be trusted?