Tagging books: A new way of organizing, classifying books

Tagging is a relatively new but increasingly popular way for Internet users to organize things by giving them personal keywords. It’s not mainstream yet, but some are calling tags “the Internet’s Dewey Decimal System.”

For a book like Gone With the Wind, you might assign tags like “Civil War,” “fiction” “epic,” and “romance.”

Users create tags for their own reasons, but they can be used by anyone, and provide an effortless, accurate recommendations system among people with similar tastes.

Tags aren’t limited to books, you can assign tags to practically anything. The site that pioneered tagging didn’t involve books, but photographs: Flickr is a social site where users store, organize and share digital photographs. Instead of using categories to organize pictures, like a folder labeled “2005 Vacation,” Flickr users tag their photos with one or two words, like “waterfall,” “solar eclipse,” “Houston,” or “Joe.” This way, photos can organized and found in several ways.

Tags are a form of metadata, which means, literally, “data about data.” Tagging creates a folksonomy, a bottom-up method of categorization or labeling. By contrast, a taxonomy is more top-down system used to show hierarchical relationships. Folksonomies are one way to combine topics and find connections that aren’t obvious through categorization.

Tags aren’t necessarily a replacement for top-down classification, but a supplemental means of organization and order. People can use their own tags and tags of others, as a way of tapping collective human intelligence. It’s a way for people to find the kind of niche content they’re looking for in from among the sea of available choices, and discover it in a democratic way from peers, not gatekeepers.

You can also tag books on Amazon and LibraryThing, a popular social-networking site for bibliophiles.