folksonomy

Just a quick thought about folksonomy (I get it: folk + taxonomy = ). I appreciate that there is some opportunity for libraries to enhance our rigid tagging scheme (LCSH) with something more fluid but I see problems in surrendering this responsibility to the masses. I've mentioned some racist tagging I've encountered in del.icio.us. What happens if we pull those sorts of tags into our catalog displays through librarything or a similar system? I suppose that you have to accept a certain level of stupidity with any scheme that depends on the masses. And I also hope that people will filter out the fringe material and focus on the core ideas represented by the majority. But I can't help but feel that we're surrendering our authority and the public's diminishing faith in libraries by following this development.

"Once again, the Internet proves that if you put an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards, they will NOT produce Hamlet."