Folksonomy, the collective categorization of resources using personally chosen tags (keywords), are currently being used not only in social networking sites such as Flickr but also in commercial web sites such as Amazon.  Tags allow users both to ceate their own system of organization and to allow them to share that organization with others.  Jessica Dye, in her article Folksonomy: A Game of High-tech (and High-stakes) states the benefits of user-generated tags on the web.  These benefits include the ability to categorize content such as photos and videos that are inaccessible to search engine bots.  Tags can also organize content that is created too quickly to be indexed by search engines.  In addition, the flexibility of tags makes them useful with information that is changes quickly such as RSS feeds and blogs. 

Tags can also have downsides as well, including the fact that they are based on an assumption of like-mindedness in disparate groups of people.  Tag clouds can possibly become too cumbersome, requiring some additional categorization.  Having a large variety of tags  limits the specificity of a search as results may be found under a related tag.   In spite of these limitations, tagging remains a viable search resource on the web.  

Does folksonomy have a place in the library catalog? Although folksonomies will never completely replace the cataloging currently used, they can be an addition to the current system.  This can be especially true for library systems such as the Chicago Public Library which include websites in their online catalog.   Two libraries which include tagging in their catalog are:

Ann Arbor District Library of Ann Arbor, Michigan (www.aadl.org)

Danbury Library of Danbury, Connecticut (http://cat.danburylibrary.org)