It’s Tax Time! —The renewable value of taxonomies

While time does not allow me to compose a full-fledged research article on the value of taxonomies, I did want to include a short list emphasizing it’s important place in the library world. Much of my research existed in the article Folksonomy Folktales by Tom Reamy, which is accessible here through St. Kate’s WilsonWeb database.

• There are many other taxonomies other than Dewey Decimal and LCSH, and using these two as examples is “as if you did an analysis of boats and picked the Titanic as your example. It’s really big and cumbersome, and it’s made of brittle steel held together with bad rivets. It costs too much and is too difficult to build. It’s slow and hard to steer, runs into icebergs and kills lots of people” (Reamy 2009). Pretty great analogy, right?
• User tags can come from specific populations, which might reinforce stereotypes (Rolla). Unlike folksonomies, taxonomies are not the “authority of the majority” (Reamy 2009).
• Taxonomies have consistent grammatical form, tense, etc.
• Taxonomies still relevant, SLA just formed an organization for taxonomies and controlled subject headings. (Taxonomy Comes to SLA)
• Good taxonomies will look at the past and the present trends and allow easy change for future (Reamy 2009).
• Study shows that many tags were “personal tags” not meant to benefit all users (Rolla 2009).

As a library student, I believe in the importance of great descriptive cataloging and accurate, descriptive subject headings. Though I see many problems with LCSH, I know that librarians themselves, or at least my peers in school, seek to be fair, democratic, unbiased, unprejudiced, and most of all successful in leading users to the information they seek. There is great merit in trained professionals evaluating an item by its content and cataloging it based on set vocabulary. But good, efficient, fair, and relevant vocabulary needs to exist first. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do think it’s a combination of many existing and emerging forms of organizing knowledge. I look forward to the opportunity to have my part in it.