Jeffrey Beall's photostream  

"How do you document real life when real life's getting more like fiction each day?" --Jonathan Larson

Answer: Pictures!

My interests include the study of metadata and its importance to information discovery and retrieval, the study of how typographical errors hinder effective information retrieval, and the weaknesses of keyword (or full text) searching, especially when compared to metadata-enabled searching.

Metadata means data about data, so tags, like the tags we use in Flickr, are a type of metadata, because they are data (the tags) about data (the pictures). Within the past couple years the term "folksonomy" has been used to describe tags that are assigned popularly, rather than by professionals (like me; in my job as a cataloger I assign Library of Congress subject headings to bibliographic records for books).

Uncontrolled tags don't work very well because they are inconsistent, wrong, and often missing.

To see my CV, go here [PDF].

I am an academic librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver in Denver, Colorado, USA.