Chris Hammond Thrasher (in Fiji no less!) commented on my post to a Facebook Library 2.0 interest group discussion. He writes:
"I think that you are right, institutional inertia in the face of new technologies can be severe - especially when libraries are faced with technologies that can seem threatening to librarians. A good example is social bookmarking. Many librarians are threatened by this sort of "amateur classification" and how popular it is. I suspect that some GIS professionsals are also concerned about the amateurization of their spatial data through initiatives such as geonames.
Is this concern founded or unfounded?"
and my reply...
I think it is a genuine concern only in the sense that the amatuer classification is seen as marginalizing the professional classification of catalogers and indexers. I highly doubt that those prefessionals need to worry about the "dirty data" of amateurs getting mixed up with professional metadata | geospatial data | cataloging records.
As I see it, it is the epitiome of the professional catalogers or GIS professionals work to be invisible to the user. If cataloging or mapping (if we may conflate the nature of their tasks), is effective, users locate the information they need without needing the knowledge of a classification system.
To take a different tack, let us consider the average person who is actively tagging their bookmarks, flickr photos or map applications. If I may be so bold as to hazard an educated guess, the active taggers are early adopters, and digital natives. From what we understand about digital natives, one way they seek information or learn new subjects is by appealing to their peer group, rather than to "experts"
In my view, "Web 2.0" tools that invite personalization, participation, and, for lack of a better word the "mnemonicization" of descriptive data simply enhances the amateurs understanding of the complexity of classification concepts and are hence creating a class of better educated library users.
