A little trip to New Zealand with Tim Spalding.
I wish to thank Tim Spalding’s What is Social Tagging? video for a little side trip to New Zealand. Watching this video reminded me of the power of other speakers I have heard at professional conferences and made me curious about using LibraryThing to locate some titles and information about New Zealand. I found reference to other titles by Keri Hulme who wrote The Bone People that I had read years ago. I now have other titles to read from an author I had always thought to be a one hit wonder. Now the trick will be finding copies of the suggest works in a library in Canada.
I loved the idea of using this site to catalogue the works in small libraries which can not afford library software or a full time, fully train librarian or library technician. It would be great for these little libraries to be able to share their collections and have a record of what they have for interest and insurance purposes. There is a large number of small collections that may never be known to anyone outside the institution that has the holdings.
Sam H. Korne seems to be giving folksonomies credibility by studying them for hierarchical structure which is one of the complaints about them from traditionalists. By giving folksonomies and by extension social cataloguing legitimacy these guys are allowing people who might not have used them otherwise to find reasons to join the social tagging community.