1. Taxonomies &
Folksonomies at MIT
A presentation at the Society for Scholarly Publishing
Annual Meeting, 29 May 2008
Robert Wolfe
Metadata Specialist, MIT Libraries

2. Introduction
Metadata Services, MIT Librares
Information Organization Consulting
Services
Supporting Educational Technology
Projects on a Cost Recovery Basis

3. Taxonomy Services
Small Controlled vocabularies for our
clients (OCW, DSpace, Wesleyan University
)
Mostly genre lists
Rarely subject taxonomies

4. Ontologies & the
Semantic Web
Ontologies vs. Taxonomies
URIs vs. literal strings
SKOS
Some projects: MIT Course Catalog Picker,
DWELL, FACADE

5. Lessons Learned
Findability
Taxonomies have limited effectiveness vs.
full-text indexing in traditional search and
browse interfaces
Taxonomies really reach their full
potential in Semantic Web applications
like faceted browsers, timelines and other
tools (see SIMILE projects)

6. Folksonomies
Our efforts aren’t strictly confined to
building tools to let users tag items in our
collections with “keywords”
There is a lot more information that users
can provide (and for which it makes a lot
more sense for them to provide). For
example: content evaluations, ratings, and
annotations.

7. MIT Libraries Efforts
The Virtual Browsery
MIT Libraries Virtual Reference
MIT Libraries Facebook and iGoogle Apps
Citation Mangement integration with
Catalog Search and Course Reading List
Management
For more see MIT Libraries Betas

8. Metadata Services Efforts
Metamedia Content Annotation
Thalia Image Repository Tagging
DSpace Rating and Recommendation
Systems

9. Lessons learned (so far)
Know why and when folksonomies work,
build tools that create supportive
environments (communities)
There are multiple factors to achieving
findability of your information resources,
taxonomies and folksonomies often
support different factors.
Our role as librarians is to build
communities and facilitate the use of best
practices in tagging.