It's obvious that we are in the middle of something big here, hence all the debate. We are moving from a profession that was all about citing sources to allowing the public to find information on their own and make their own decisions about the validity. While this is a major transition for old-school librarians, the newer, younger staff can embrace it much easier. I feel like I am one of the middle-grounders. I like the organized, everything in its proper place of the old ways; yet I find myself wanting to do more on my own. When I am searching for something, in a new place, or just facing a new experience, I first want to "do it myself"; but I don't mind asking for help if I need it.
So I find myself in the middle of the metadata debate also. At first I agreed that - Yes, we need one thesaurus to cover all topics. Make it easier to find what we need in any format. But the specialized vocabularies are important also. For instance, if you are looking for medical information, you don't want to pull up every situation of that term and have the medical source buried deep in pages and pages of results. So what we need is a happy medium so we can chose if we want a specific source or not.
I am also having some trouble giving up ownership of tags and keywords to the general public. While cataloging still has many old-fashioned terms still in use, I saw the trouble just five of us had in trying to catalog some photographs - and that was with using a specialized art thesaurus. We were all over the place in deciding what the pictures were really about. I still haven't decided if folksomonies are going to help or hinder. ON TO THE FUTURE!
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