Subject Guides, the Folksonomic way

Del.icio.us, the bookmarking website with tags that I discussed on January 6, seems like the perfect tool for creating course-specific subject guides. Just agree on a tag, like the course number, and the subject librarian, professor, and students can build a subject guide cooperatively, on the fly.

I just tagged the two resources I identified for my Digital Libraries class with the course number. So they are now easily found by myself, and anyone else in the class, at del.icio.us/tag/sislt9409.

I wrote my paper on subject guides in my first semester of library school, a month before an article was published that rendered nearly everything I wrote obsolete. "Students, Librarians, and Subject Guides: Improving a Poor Rate of Return" by Brenda Reeb and Susan Gibbons in the January 2004 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy concluded that if subject guides were to really reach students, they should be written at the course level--not "History Subject Guide" but "Resources for History 414: The 19th Century Working Woman."

Of course, Reed and Gibbons pointed out that "for libraries supporting several thousand classes a semester, customizing research resources at a course level is simply not possible...." But maybe with a tool like del.icio.us, it is possible. With the added advantage of involving everyone in the process.

The system of user-created tags that makes the categories in del.icio.us and flickr has a name: folksonomy. A taxonomy created by folks.

I explored the blogosphere on the topic yesterday and discovered some debate (like the most recent posts on the multi-authored blog Many2Many) about controlled vocabularies versus folksonomies, which sounds like it pits librarians against everyone else. But that debate isn't happening among the librarians. David Bigwood of Catalogablog explains why it's not an either/or proposition for librarians.

Librarians are saying "cool, what can I do with this stuff?" Jenny Levine of The Shifted Librarian is hosting a workshop on the topic as a way to start a discussion and has created a mock-up of how the library catalog might look with a folksonomic twist.     #

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