USF SLIS: East Coast Connection

David Weinberger dedicates his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous to the librarians, and it has the librarian blogosphere buzzing, and is being hailed as a must read by those who agree and disagree alike.

Weinberger argues that the world of information is undergoing a transformation from the physical world to the digital world, and the knowledge classification schemes we use need to catch up to this new reality. Back when all information had to exist in a place, and when it's surrogates had to be organized in a place, hierarchies were a necessary way to classify information, but now that our information has freed itself from the physical world, hierarchical classification schemes are no longer necessary. Like many others, Weinberger seems to be in favor of developing faceted classification schemes, which allow people to construct their own hierarchies, which will lead them to the information they are looking for. He is also in favor of organizing information through tagging. The more tags an item has, the more people tagging, the messier the information gets, the more miscellaneous it gets, the more valuable and accurate it becomes. His love of social knowledge doesn't stop with tagging. He also has a lot of great things to say about wikipedia (aka the scourge of every librarian). He speaks of the advantages wikipedia has over encyclopedias. First of all, breadth. Wikipedia can cover many more topics than encylopedias, because they don't have to be as concerned about one topic taking space from another. He also defends wikipedia's accuracy, and suggests it will get better with time, as some of the more controversial posts sort themselves out through compromise.

I think his main argument is that we are no longer forced to impose false order or rankings upon information, or at least as a society we don't have to attempt to agree, we can now recognize that everything doesn't fit neatly into categories. We don't have to decide if capris are pants our shorts. We no longer have to fight over how to order things, we can each order them our own way, and by doing this we add to the meta-data ourselves, helping others find what they are looking for. This new information environment continues to soak up information, and to correct poor information. We have a great opportunity to take advantage of information like never before, but we can't continue to interact with it the way we did when we still needed card catalogs.