Facebook as a Catalog

Well, readers, I have been inundated with periodicals lately. One article that stood out from the flood was From Friending to Research, by Anne Pemberton. I thought this was a great idea - using something familiar to many people (facebook) to explain some of the more abstract concepts associated with librarianship. I have a couple of favorites I want to highlight...



I loved the point Ms. Pemberton made about the need for advanced searching. The "one box" method (think Google, or the single search boxes on facebook, or in a library's webpage) are nice, but make choosing the best of many options difficult. Nothing highlights this better than when you are searching for someone on Facebook with a common name. That said, maybe Facebook should think about making it easier to get to the advanced search interface...

Of course, as a cataloger, I loved her point about the connection between tagging people in items on Facebook, and a controlled vocabulary in a catalog. She says that she rarely uses that phrase any more, and I think that's a bit of a mistake. To me, tagging in a catalog has more of a crowd-sourced meaning, rather the opposite of the carefully researched preferred names in, say, the LCSH. However, the connection is useful and pertinent - that in order to find the right "thing" or tag the right person, we must all use a common title for this entity. By the same token, these tags must be updated automatically when the heading is changed - because if it isn't, you defeat the purpose of the controlled vocabulary.

Hope you liked her article - I think it's a great idea! How else do you think librarianship can be explained better using common knowledge examples?