I talked with Laurie Allen yesterday during the lunch break at the Annenberg conference on hyperlinks. She works on U of Pennsylvania’s PennTags project that allows readers to tag catalogued books. Some people use tags for personal bookmarking. Others tag more socially. It’s a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so!

By integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy), you instantaneously get the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

I didn’t talk with Laurie about this, but my guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, but the folksonomy could supplement it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for “recipes” could take you to the “cuisine” category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here’s the tag cloud for the node you’re browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project.

(U of Penn’s Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you’re interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, the death of the Internet due to the venal stupidity of Congress, etc.) [Tags: penntags laurie_allen taxonomy libraries folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous tagging ]

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