Social bookmarking: Library 2.0 Activity #10

I remember the trouble I had trying to create a reference collection for a book conservator. There were so many photocopies, so many possible access points, to file, along with books, journals, and supplier catalogs. When I created my wiki for the intranet at my other work, I found all sorts of websites, assigned to various subject headings, with brief annotations. I've wondered how to get more visibility. I find so many interesting sites on the Net, but have wondered how to keep track of them. I've used a free service called Backflip.com occasionally for posting my favorites online, but don't use it often. Tagging services like de.licio.us are a godsend, by comparison. There is so much information that seems so intractable, so miscellaneous, under old, hierarchical systems of classification. I've noticed that the name of S. R. Ranganathan gets invoked more and more these days. He was glossed over in my library school course on classification systems, but his faceted approach now seems prophetic. The biggest problem remains authority control. There are so many different ways to describe graphic images and three-dimensional objects. I remember Benjamin Whorf's anthropological study, where one group of children sorted beads by shape, another group by color. Many remember Rashomon, as well as the many plots it has inspired, including the current film, Vantage Point. How do you corroborate witnesses' testimony? How do you build consensus when there are so many synonyms, so many different aspects to look at? The trouble is, most people can't see the value of using subject descriptors, since the World Wide Web isn't cataloged. I wonder whether the "Invisible Web" may be growing faster than the rest of it, simply because of inadequate tagging and searching. In spite of "The Long Tail", people are still researching using the distribution models of Zipf and Bradford. Google's rankings remind me of how the scientific and scholarly community used the Institute of Scientific Information's citation indexes to determine who had the most influence in their professions. With an uncataloged World Wide Web out there, deli.cio.us and other such bookmarking sites are the best approach we're going to get, for now. I've always liked promoting lesser-known writers and musicians. Now I know how to reach more people more quickly, without being a spammer, huckster or peddler.