Collective Cataloging: the Future of Cataloging?

Argument: Crowdsourcing elements of collective cataloging should be utilized in traditional cataloging environments.

Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, gave a presentation at the 2008 ALA conference explaining LibraryThing and highlighting its collective cataloging elements.  Here is part 1:

In the video, Spalding points out several interesting elements of LibraryThing.  Starting at 4:08 he mentions the "common knowlege" section of a books record that displays information not commonly in a traditional catalog including places, characters, awards the book has won, and unique series information.  This information allows access and collocation of works not previously possible in a catalog.  On LibraryThing, one can retrieve a list of books that have the character Darth Vader, a legitimate and natural choice of access point for Darth Vader fans.

Then at 4:42 we see the series page for Star Wars books that collocates all the books from the Star Wars universe.  Thanks to the collective cataloging of information not found in traditional catalogs, unique series information and relationships between the books are able to be shown.  One section of the Star Wars series page on LibraryThing shows the list of Star Wars books according to when they take place within the Star Wars timeline.  This information is very valuable to an interested reader of Star Wars books, but something that doesn't happen in library catalogs.  Spalding states, "This page encapsulates more accurate information about the Star Wars books and how they relate to each other than...has ever been assembled."

Spalding makes a third point that is perhaps the strongest element of collective cataloging: "Who is the expert when it comes to the Star Wars books? It's these guys."  Experts on the works and their aboutness are those that read the works.  Catalogers cannot read every information item they catalog so they assign subject headings according to supplementary material often provided by publishers.  One example in the video shows subject headings assigned to a book based off the flap copy don't accurately reflect the work.  Cataloging done by those who read the books are much more likely to accurately reflect the subject of the work.

Tags and tagging are also a big part of the collective cataloging model of LibraryThing.  Through tags, users are able to create unique access points to collocate works.  The video shows some of the effects of tagging: unique genres (paranormal romance), more natural language (cooking vs. cookery), "tagmashing" for complex subjects (France+wwII), & built in relevancy due to # of tags.  About some of the more non-traditional genres on LibraryThing, Spalding says, "This is as real as anything in the Library of Congress".


Part 2 of the presentation:

Part two of the video points out some of the shortcomings of current, physical-based cataloging:

• limited subjects (3-6)
• all subjects are equally true
• subject headings never change
• only librarians add subjects: only one interpretation
• classification must be hierarchical
• only items are cataloged (as opposed to works, expressions, or series)
• must be done in a library
• libraries aren't good at sharing metadata (but are good at getting metadata from a central source)

Clearly, traditional cataloging in non-ideal in many ways.  New methods of collective cataloging and tagging can help to overcome many of the short comings and help users to search in more ways and retrieve information objects more effectively.  Libraries would benefit from adopting some collective cataloging practices.  Traditional cataloging has many strengths, so I'm not at all advocating getting rid of MARC and/or AARC2 (soon RDA), but instead we should either change specific cataloging rules integrate crowdsourcing into the current systems.