So I’m reading this relatively-spirited debate between Clay Shirky and Louis Rosenfeld about formal versus informal naming schemes (”Controlled Vocabularies” versus “Folksonomies”) as applied to social networking and feel like I’m having a flashback to ten years ago when I was a graduate student working on my Masters of Library Science.

The faculty and students quickly split into two factions, whom I always thought of as the “Book-ists” and the “Web-ists.” The Book-ists were committed to the idea that information should be stored in Books, which in turned should be stored in libraries. If you wanted access to one of those books, you should want it badly enough that you would come to a library, search through either a card catalog or a ludicrously slow mainframe terminal (which you probably had to wait in line to use), then go find the book on the shelves, hoping all the while that no one else had been just as motivated as you to acquire this bit of knowledge and beaten you to it, either checking out or stealing the book that you wanted. If it sounds like an inferior way to go about getting access to information, it’s because it was. Thus, the Book-ists effectively removed themselves from the debate over how to apply the librarian’s view of Information Management to the Web.

Meanwhile, over in the Business School, where I found myself doing some TA’ing to make ends meet by teaching Internet technologies, including the Web, to MBA students. They could have cared less how the information was organized at a macro level. They just wanted two things:
1) To get Their Stuff on the Web
2) To make some money in the process

Meanwhile, the Web-ists back at the library school were busy arguing about what approach everyone should be taking to classifying their data. I remember debates over how best to apply the META tags in document headers, or simply insisting that the Web was too chaotic to ever replace nice, tidy information tools like Gopher. The crew over at the business school, however, not knowing what they didn’t know, were hiring programmers and graphic artists (re-christened as “Web Developers”) and cooking up the dot-com boom as fast as they could type Business Plans.

So now the World Wide Web which was coming out of nowhere with Homepages popping up all over the place and anybody could just stick a link to another page with no consideration of whether it made sense or whether that Homepage would be there tomorrow or what the heck was going on. There was no way to find a homepage except to either take a guess (IBM? Maybe they’re at “www.ibm.com”) or to ask someone you knew if they had seen a particular page.

That was the vacuum. So about that same time, a couple of guys at Stanford began obsessively bookmarking pretty much any and every site they encountered using a roughly hierarchical set of bookmarks. They then published their bookmarks on their own web server as Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Thus was born the Search Engine, and with it the End Of Relevance for the Web-ist’s debates over how best to catalog Web sites.

Suddenly, the definition of “good” and “bad” things to put in META tags shifted away from any attempt at rational definition and was instead defined by one simple question: Will this increase or decrease my pages’ rankings in search engine results? An entire industry sprang up devoted to software and or services to help get sites indexed by search engines, hopefully in a way which improved their ranking in searches for a particular term. The Information Management experts had missed their opportunity yet again.

Now, I learn that the debate over whether only trained experts can successfully catalog data is still alive and well. Personally, I think the whole argument is moot. As the past ten years have now shown, so long as people get halfway close to right in describing their metadata, the Search Engines will do the rest. To try to argue that only experts can successfully catalog data requires you to pretend that the past ten years never existed.