It wasn’t that long ago that the primary ways of organizing information were by the Dewey Decimal System or by the Library of Congress Classification System. Or just by alphabetizing. Technology initially made this kind of organizing easier because we could sort information by it’s title or author or other categories, or even search for call numbers, authors, titles, etc.

Then came keywords, which revolutionized the cataloging industry (for good or for bad), because now you could search for any word in any field in a library catalog. The same was true of Internet search engines. The catch was that those keywords had to be CREATED, entered by the person who was adding all the other information. Keyword searching was (and is) only as effective as the cataloger is thorough.

Enter tagging. This is the phenomenon where the viewer can add their own descriptors–the end user, rather than the “initial user.” Standardization as we know it is gone, along with the controlled vocabulary, replaced by Folksonomy. Anything that makes sense to the reader can be entered as a descriptor for the information in question.

Right now, this is basically an Internet phenomenon. People are tagging pictures, websites, bookmarks, maps, etc., with labels of their own devising, but that has not extended to library catalogs yet. At least, not that I have heard of yet. Any librarians out there allowing their patrons to add tags the library’s catalog entries? … {crickets chirping} … anyone? … Somebody’s got to be.

Anyway, thanks to tools such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, Frappr, Technorati, and Library Thing, anyone can add tags to all kinds of things. Not only does this help the person organize the information, but through these Social Software programs they can connect to other pieces of information that other users have given the same tag to. Click a tag and see a list of everything that anyone has given that tag to.

We talk about the overabundance of information that the Internet has given us access to. Well, here is one of the ways that people are making sense of all this information and organizing it in ways that are meaningful to them.

And then we add RSS feeds on top of this. Now not only can we apply our own labels to things that we find on the Internet, we can get notified whenever the list of resources with our tags gets changed. Someone adds a new bookmark to Del.icio.us with a tag I’m interested in, and I’m automatically notified. With a link to the site thrown in!

While this does help us get a grasp on the Wide World of Information, helping prevent information overload, it does have ramifications for libraries. We’re just at the beginning of this tagging phenomenon. What about 5 or 10 years down the road, when young people have “grown up” with tagging? Will our library patrons be expecting the ability to tag records in their library catalog? Will we be willing to let them?