The Job of Organizing

Organizing books and materials used to be in the domain of professionally trained catalogers and indexers. Now, through Web 2.0, it is in the hands of everyday "folk." What are the implications of this trend for librarians? Also, for additional food for thought, go to your Delicious site and examine your list of tags. In your opinion, are these tags more or less helpful than traditional subject headings?

I believe that the implications of every people organizing information will be felt more online than in actual libraries. In a library there is still a librarian and people who are responsible for cataloging and organizing books and materials. I don't see that changing any time soon. The real impact of this is felt online where anyone can access sites such as Wikipedia and edit information. Information as well as software that can be edited and changed by anyone online could make a librarians job more difficult but could also offer more resources as well. Librarians will have to be familiar with these online places that are thriving in Web 2.0. Librarians will have to decide if sites like Wikipedia can be trusted to supply information to patrons. On the flip side, Web 2.0 opens up possibilities of software and applications that may not have been available to everyone in the past. Although it will take some weeding through information and adapting I believe that librarians can use these everyday "folk" as an asset to their libraries and patrons.

I think the tags used on the delicious site are much more useful than a traditional subject heading. Traditional headings may only tell the one or two main ideas of something where multiple tags can easily and quickly tell you everything about what you are looking at. Tagging is basically subjects headings done in a more efficient manner.