Turns out Michael Wesch released two videos last week--A Vision of Students Today, and another video (similar to the Machine is Us/ing Us) looking at changes in the ways we create, access and categorize information. (see below for the embedded video)
This video reminded me of how I used to teach web searching (back in 2003, to be exact). I emphasized using directories, and within directories, categories, to strategically find the best information on the web. Remember Yahoo!'s Directory? (Heck, remember when Yahoo! was basically nothing but a directory?) Did you know that Google has a Directory? Remember when LII was a go-to source for many topics?
In this video, Wesch looks back at that time period, stating of Yahoo!:
Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.
That they did. And we librarians dutifully taught it.
Wesch adds:
Since then, the Web has been challenging our most basic assumptions. We learned that we might not need complex hierarchies to find information.
I'm sure this will become fully realized someday. I still utilize subject hierarchies, such as when I'm teaching students how to search in ProQuest. It works in that environment--ProQuest is a select pool of resources that tends to be pretty narrowly categorized, and the categories can sometimes help users ferret out the best information on more arcane topics.
But will there come a day when we no longer need subject headings? When, as Weinberger says, "Everything is miscellaneous"? I think it's closer than we think. Certainly closer than I could have visualized just four short years ago.
This video draws pretty heavily from this Clay Shirky article - that quote about Yahoo adding the shelf back is taken directly from it. Definitely worth reading.
It makes a good point about where subject headings would be appropriate; the DSM-IV, for example, will always have that kind of classification. In the end I think there will always be subject headings; the challenge is that they'll increasingly be *our* subject headings, and mine may not look anything like anyone else's.
I enjoyed the video and get the idea that traditional "constraining" categories don't fit anymore, but aren't tags just another form of categorization? Sure they are now often user generated, but for every good tag, there is an equally bad tag. Take a look at youtube and see if people are using the same standards across submissions -- they aren't and it makes it really hard to narrow down a search. I agree that we don't necessarily need a shelf, but we definitely need organization via metadata that is informative enough to at least let me find what I am looking for; otherwise, everything is miscellaneous and nigh impossible to find...
Kevin--Wow, thank you for the link to the Shirky article! (in some ways I think I enjoyed it more than the video that started this whole discussion.)
This was my favorite quote from it (which also somewhat references what Andrew was saying about tagging): "As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value."