Controlled vocabulary=control?

When I finally catch up on all of my Bloglines feeds, I'll have to come up with more creative (and original) ways to create content for my blog. But, for now, you're stuck with me commenting on other people's thoughts.

Tim from LibraryThing writes about tagging and the power of suggestion in this post. He talks about the fact that, with tags, the words that appear in the title of a book (as well as how they're formatted) impact how a user tags the book. He writes "Titles influence how we tag things. Most of the books on birds and birding could be tagged with either term, but books with 'birds' in the title rank higher on the 'birds' tag."

It illustrates an interesting point about why librarians sometimes aren't so keen about letting users tag records. Is it really okay for users to assign the same tag to books about two closely related, but different, subjects? Can't you just hear the collective gasp of the cataloging community?

I suspect that if you ask people who don't want to add tags to their library catalogs why they're against it, you'd hear an argument that distills thusly:

"We don't want to give up control of the way that our users search for information."

Controlled vocabulary does, in fact, give librarians control over how users search for information in that it gives users a known way to find information on a given topic. You know, for instance, that all of the cookbooks can probably be found using the word "cookery."

The thing is, controlled vocabulary does a pretty decent job of collocating books on a given subject, if the people assigning the subject headings and classification numbers do a good job of making sure that they are adding the same subject headings to all books on the same subject. If they don't, it's anyone's guess how well you'll find all of the books on any given topic.

The other thing is that some of the controlled vocabulary that librarians are holding onto just doesn't work for users.

Let's revisit our friend "cookery," shall we? How many people know that the word "cookery" is the magic key that opens the door to all of the cookbooks? Probably not many.

If library users don't speak librarian-ese, they sure don't speak "cataloger." Heck, I'm a cataloger and I don't speak "cataloger" very fluently.

Those same people who have a hard time giving up control of controlled vocabulary will tell you that with tagging, it's hard to collocate titles under any given topic. They'll show you Tim's example about birds vs. birding and tell you that if we add tags to our catalog that nobody will ever be able to find anything.

Poppycock, I say.

Mmm...popycock...*drools*

First of all, in our catalogs, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach. Keep the controlled vocabulary, but allow your users to add tags to records. It will help your cataloging staff which, I bet, is having a hard time keeping up with work anyway.

See, as a cataloger, I do my best to assign subject headings to the things I'm cataloging and sometimes it's easier than other times. Working in an academic institution, there are things that come across my desk that I will never be able to understand. Technical science documents, complex sociological texts, and on and on. I do my best with these materials, but I know that there are people out there who know way more about this stuff than I do.

And the beauty of having tags in your catalog is knowing that people who know more than you have the ability to help make your work better.

Tags aren't perfect though. It is hard work to wrangle all of the different ways to describe a book (bird vs. birding, anyone). But that's where librarians can circle back into the picture. If it becomes a problem that limits access, librarians could help bring various tags together, choosing the most-used tag. But if it's never a problem, let users create tags that reflect the way that they speak.

I went to a program this past week where Michael Stephens from Tame the Web in which he talked about "The Hyperlinked Library." He kicked copious amounts of boo-tay and I was thrilled, inspired, and humbled to have gotten the chance to be there. One of the things Stephens talked about was the idea of Radical Trust. He said that we should trust not only our colleagues, but also the user.

To me, this is key when thinking about letting other vocabularies intermingle with our precious controlled vocabulary. Tagging and controlled vocabulary can co-exist peacefully, and letting them do so is an exercise in trusting the user.

Can we do it?