Supporters or curious observers of Tim’s project probably just prefer to remain in Lurkdom.

Can’t we all just get along?

I do apologize for the language. I have been getting it rather hard from various quarters. This would be fine if it were about ideas, but I am offended by constant necessity to imply I am an ignoramus—that I don’t know the difference between tagging and classification, and have never looked into the history of the field. Having spent two years obsessed with these issues, this line of attack just ticks me off. Good grief, I’ve personally interviewed the catalogers at the Athenaeum and Forbes Library, and a scholar of dead classifications, to understand the Cutter Classification better. Give me some credit, at least until there is some solid evidence.

I also liked the suggestion that I take the time to read David Weinberger The latter ticked me off something fierce. I not only had one of the first ARCs, but I’ve read it three times, have two separately underlined copies, ordered a case of the book and gave them out at librarians at conferences and have had extensive online and off with David. He even sent me draft articles to comment on.

But sometimes I should try humor instead of sleen. My wife suggested “I got his numbah. How do you like them apples?”

My general opinion – I love projects that develop organically like this. Experiment, explore, discuss, change things mid-stream until they work, then change them again when you discover another way they can work. It’s exciting and creative and will shake things up. Will it be a success? Dunno yet. But it will definitely be a fun trip!

So far, I’m enjoying the discussion, and learning a lot, in the group – http://www.librarything.com/groups/buildtheopenshelvesc#forums

The sentence I was responding to was: “You need to completely define the problem you are trying to solve before you pose it.”

It would follow that I should not have posed this topic—that I should have shut up and that asking people to develop an idea “in the open” shouldn’t be attempted. That is the opposite of running things up the flagpole, or turning ideas over, and therefore the opposite of both reasoned discussion and what libraries need.

My point is that your call for action confuses classification schemes, subject thesauri, and folksonomies. It’s not clear which you’re trying to build and they are distinctly different.

But calling another’s well-meant criticism “bullshit” won’t make you any friends. Good luck with the project.

I’m not speaking of OSC. I’m speaking of LibraryThing, and it’s currently employing nine people—three of them librarians. We figured it out as we went along. And that was *good*.

You do NOT need to “completely define the problem you are trying to solve before you pose it.” That is an excuse to do nothing. It is, in a word, bullshit.

If an idea is on the right track, the problems will begin to proclaim their existence.

Deschamps’s Second Law of Innovation:

All problems are people problems.

Wikipedia. PHP. Perl. Democracy.