I learned about a web site called www.librarything.com today from an email to the OSS4Lib (Open Source Software for Libraries - not that LibraryThing is open source) email discussion list. Quite an exciting idea, really. I’ll let the site speak for itself: read the about page. Pay special attention to the “What are tags? (short answer)” and “What are tags? (long answer).”

If you’re not quite keen on what this is all about, LibraryThing.com is a social cataloging site that does for books what Flickr
does for digital photos.

Still stumped? I’ll admit the ramifications of these sorts of social networks grouped around intellectual resources (for lack of a better term) are only now beginning to sink in for me. At the heart of it all is a concept referred to as folksonomy.

It’ll be interesting over the next few years, watching what sort of relationship libraries and folksonomies strike.