Searching through the non-fiction shelves of my local library is now just a tad more annoying than it used to be since perusing the results of a December 2006 survey outlining the demographics of ‘taggers’ and accompanying interview with David Weinberger.
In a forthcoming book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, describes how people are putting ideas, information and knowledge together now that the digital age has encouraged alternatives to organizing information like the Dewey Decimal system.
On this particular day I had undertaken the frustrating task of trying to locate the book, ‘The Weather Makers’ by Tim Flannery, in the library’s catalogue. Unfortunately at the time I didn’t know the name of the book, only some generic information about the subject matter. After an exhaustive search I finally managed to find the book I was looking for, then found myself searching the 3+ shelves that comprised the single Dewey decimal point I was directed to. I found it eventually, but had to agree with the author (of the article that explores the survey results) that perhaps our ever growing store of human knowledge is getting to unwieldy for traditional discovery methods.
Funnily enough, when I got home I was able to find the book’s title and author in less than 5 seconds using a tag search of a popular social bookmarking site… Fantastic read by the way, highly recommended!
2 Comments
our ever growing store of human knowledge is getting to unwieldy for traditional discovery methods.
I’d have to agree. So far as finding something that we know about, the old systems have become almost irrelevant. But the dewey taxonomy wasn’t really designed, like ISSN, to point directly at a particular book. It was made to classify the shelves on which a particular kind of book may be discovered. It’s made for encouraging a person to browse. So it’s not much good if you’re after something which you already know about, especially these days when we’re drowning in info.
But if you think laterally then there is a use for the dewey. The basis of the new networks is that they are all built around groups of people getting together to have natter and share their learning objects about a particular subject. So it could be used to give the groups a set spot in cyberspace. i.e. if yu think in terms of www.groups.edu.au then yu might find the teachers/students interested in web design at www.776.600.edu.au. http://ddc.typepad.com/025431/2007/01/making_dewey_vi.html#comments
As a way of directing people interested in sharing their learning to a set spot in cyberspace where they can tag (and store) their learning objects, it offers some hope. Weathermakers. Good book eh?
BTW, the complete link above is http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11232
It won’t fit in the ‘Website’ box
“So it could be used to give the groups a set spot in cyberspace”
I think that is a really interesting idea, and certainly has sparked some interesting debate in your forum thread! I’m a little bit scared to join in because I’m not sure I have the information management knowledge to back up my comments… One problem I can foresee is the lack of scalability, which comes back to the author’s comment in the original article that some topics are much broader than others. Perhaps that’s where the tags would serve to further categorise broad topic headings?
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