Tagging in the Catalogue

I read a very interesting post about tagging from one of our Learning 2.0 participants, Mythmade. While exploring tagging for Task 5, Mythmade was looking at the use of patron tagging in the Ann Arbor District Library catalogue. At this library customers can add tags to individual titles in the catalogue and all other users can see and use them.

Our trusty correspondent made this very perceptive comment:

The other reservation with this usage is skewing of library content. Ann Arbor obviously has a few GenYer's who are very Web2.0 savy [...] Music, graphic novels, anime and fantasy themes dominate the tags in the Cloud.

This pricked my interest as I had been following this project, dubbed SOPAC (the Social OPAC), from it's acclaimed implementation (read the comments on the blog post introducing the SOPAC's introduction).

What is most interesting is that the creator of SOPAC, John Blyberg, recently expressed the same sentiment in a blog post discussing the relationship between libraries and Web 2.0. He said:

I’ll even turn the tables on myself and admit that I was wrong about local tagging in the OPAC. SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure. For the past nine months, the top ten tags have included “fantasy”, “manga”, “anime”, “time travel”, “shonen”, “shonen jump”, and “shape-changing”. As a one-time resident of Ann Arbor, I can assure you that these are not topics that dominated the collective hive mind.

As I see it, the problem with tagging in SOPAC is that the number of users contributing tags is too small. You need a critical mass of users for any sort of folksonomy to work. Indeed, this is the reason that Wikipedia is so successful - the number of contributors acts as a sort of check & balance mechanism. There are theories about why these types of social software work as well as they do and if you're interested you might like to chase up The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

So, how can we implement tagging in the catalogue without skewing the results based on the few users who are adding tags? The answer might just be LibraryThing for Libraries. LibraryThing is a social network for booklovers. It allows you to catalogue your own books online along with descriptive tags. The LibraryThing database can then connect you with others who have similar reading interests based on what books you have in common. There's over 24,000,000 books and 368,000 members adding content.

LibraryThing for Libraries allows libraries to leverage this content by adding tags and book recommendations from the LibraryThing database to their catalogue. You can see it in action at
Yarra Plenty Library in Victoria and we are currently looking at this service in regards to our catalogue. These are interesting times!