Bibliocide by Cataloging

"Librarians have long tried to catalog the world in all its complexity. They want to describe things accurately, find the right name for this rare bird or that; but they are also looking for a description that fits into the architecture of information, that shows where the bird fits into its family, genus, species and so on. They argue passionately about the facts." [pg 120, This Book Is Overdue!]

Human beings like labels. For whatever reason, we all enjoy an easy way to divide up and quantify the world around us. Back when there weren't as many labels for things, we made tales of evil in the forests or gods at the bottoms of sinkholes. Putting a label on something allows a human being to relax slightly because that means we Know What It Is and can probably deal with it.

But what if something isn't easily labeled? What if the things you're trying to describe is neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat? Some times, in the past, we made up another label and just stuck it on there. Check any local plant guide to find out how many names your area has for Queen Anne's Lace. More recently though, I've noticed a trend towards "tagging" and that makes me nervous.

A Tag isn't a bad thing. It's a search term added to something in a database that allows whatever you're looking for to be located by subject. Generally a generic, but useful feature. This blog so far could be tagged "bibliophile", "Books" and possibly "lunatic". The trouble with tagging though is that the choice of tag is often dependent whoever created the entry in the database, and what they think that entry is. Totally fine if it's a piece about the mating habits of the common goldfish, but what if you're talking something new here? What if you found a rare anti-gravity goldfish who lives in trees and shoots tiny black holes out of its eyes? How do you tag something that's new, that doesn't even have a name or a jargon attached to it? and that's where things get sticky

I like to watch movies on one of the gamines consoles at the house. The program I use accesses a massive database and allows me to flip through and pick almost anything I want to watch and then streams it to my place. I don't even have to locate my shoes if I'm craving a film. The trouble with it is, it's a tag-dependent system and the entries were made by someone who really doesn't see films the same way I do. If I tell it that I really like one particular Shakespearean film it will assume I like all of them. But what if I only liked it because of a particular actor or a really spiff hat? I don't have a way to search the database for movies "With dialog like Lion In Winter, heavy sci-fi action, and a great musical number half-way though" because no one else makes tags like that. Ok, the movie in question may not exist but how am I to know?

In the long run I'm curious to find out how many pieces of information we've lost or missed out on because somebody really needed to hang a label on it and define it once and for all. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go find my umbrella. There's something shining in the treetops and I want to keep the goldfish out of my hair.