Bolg Post 4- "The Job of Organizing"

I was asked to consider the following and respond:

"Organizing books and materials used to be in the domain of professionally trained catalogers and indexers. Now, through Web 2.0, it is in the hands of everyday "folk." What are the implications of this trend for librarians? Also, for additional food for thought, go to your Delicious site and examine your list of tags. In your opinion, are these tags more or less helpful than traditional subject headings?"

I feel like the trend of everyone being able to organize materials for them selves is helpful to librarians.  I remember growing up and feeling like it was a secret code the way items were organized in a library.  I always felt lost in libraries when I first went to them.  I like being able to organize books and materials in my own way.  As a teacher, I had to organize my classroom library.  I started off by organizing by genre, just like a library, and soon found my students could never find anything.  After talking with them, I discovered they expected to find the books in the classroom arranged by reading level.  Once I did that, they not only found what they wanted but also were more active in reading books.  They had different expectations in the library.  They wanted it arranged by genre because they had call numbers to use to help them find what they wanted.

I feel it is the same with the Web 2.0 trend.  We find items easier when natural language is used to catalog and organize material.  This implies that library patrons would feel more comfortable in libraries is they could use natural language to search.  I found my tags on Delicious very helpful because they are the words I would search with.  Delicious offered suggested tags for some websites and I found those to be exactly what I would use.  When searching in Ebsco for journal articles, I have found that they tag an article with words that never once appear in the article.  This is frustrating because words may be related but not synonymous.  If natural language had been used I feel I would not face that problem.  Everyday “folk” are the patrons of the library, so it makes sense to arrange books and materials in a way that uses natural language.