In my Information Organization class, the one with the cement-brick equivalent textbook that is already two years out of date (you know the one) , there was a whole section (chapter? I don’t know, I gave the wretched thing to a friend taking the class) full of unenthusiastic academic hand-wringing about folksonomies. Which is pretty much the attitude of most InfoSci professionals I’ve talked to, even the ones who like it.
It’s an old refrain, at this point, to say that our profession was caught off guard by the whole “tagging” concept. We were used to standards and practices and standardized practices that involved cataloguers, classification schemas, and jargon. It worked. It still does work, because it has to, because we need that structure on the backend.
But users don’t. They glommed onto OPACs because they could never find what they wanted in a card catalogue without help, and they glommed onto Google because, well, everything. They love tagging, and use it mercilessly everywhere – tumblr, pinterest, goodreads, you name it—or rather, they name it.
The end result is conflicted InfoSci professionals; we love engagement, after all. We love participation. We LOVE people using the resources we give them. But…we get all squinty eyed about legitimizing folksonomies. We worry. We know that folksonomies won’t ever replace librarians (even if other people think so) but we fret about structure, classification, ORDER.
Hey, that’s what we do.
But while we stand around dialoguing, users have solved their own problem. And by “users” I mean the Archive of Own Own fanfiction archive. This new kid on the block has done an outstanding job of doing what they call “tag wrangling” with a veritable army of volunteers. You can snicker about fanfic all you want, but this is one hell of a serious (and large) bunch of data crunchers.
A recent blog post at the OTW explains the whole thing; go read it.
Then let me know what you think. Because me? I’m pretty damn impressed. They’ve made a potentially chaotic system one of the most useful features of the whole site. In fact, I would recommend to any InfoSci professional thinking about databases and tagging and user needs to study that archive set up carefully. It’s not perfect and it’s officially in beta but even so it is compact, useful, and scalable.
Which is to say, we just got our collective ass spanked by an amateur project* staffed by volunteers. I’m not too worried about that, as long as we learn from it.
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*I waffled over this word choice, since I know for a fact that there are more than a few InfoSci people involved with AO3 at various levels, and some people might object to calling the AO3 an amateur project given how professionally put together (and run) it is. However my intention is to indicate that this very large, very popular information tool was not created by any library or similar organization staffed by LIS people. Wikipedia is no different, and I would honestly put AO3 on the same level as Wikipedia, in regards to just how damn well it does what it is meant to do. So the phrase “amateur project” is not intended as a put down but rather in a more literal sense, that is, a project developed and run outside of any official, professional LIS purview.
