Academic research has show that "wisdom of the masses" does work in certain specific kinds of settings. Librarything, google, delicious, and the "ask the audience" lifeline on Who Wants to be a Millionaire all demonstrate that it works on a more pragmatic way.
The problem is that there have to be "masses" involved in being wise, and "the library staff" don't count as the masses. This is why Librarything for Libraries works: it's taking a REAL mass of book lovers and using that as the base collection of tags and ratings for the library catalogue, rather than trying to create a new collection of tags from scratch in a small community (it doesn't matter how big your library is, the set of users that will tag is small compared to the LT community). -David On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Jason Etheridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Deanna Frazee > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Wisdom of the masses....that's where my problem lies. I don't believe it >> exists :) > > Wisdom of the masses is the main way that relevancy in Google works. > Except, instead of tagging, it's linking. > > -- > Jason Etheridge > | VP, Community Support and Advocacy > | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts > | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) > | email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > | web: http://www.esilibrary.com >
