I’ve not been a huge fan of the Seattle Public Library’s new building, but I spent some time there this weekend and I must admit that, on a rainy November night (in Seattle it’s now “night” at 5pm), the chartreuse-and-cerise decor seemed almost cozy–and cozy is what I like in a library. The fact that I got to curl up in a practice room with a piano and a book of Cole Porter tunes may have affected my mood, but maybe it’s a building I can get sentimental about someday.

But what has always impressed me about the place (this weekend, and even in an earlier and crabbier phase) is the Dewey Spiral. It’s a taxonomist’s dream: a world where the floor itself announces in huge black-on-white numbers just where you are in the realms of knowledge as you tramp through the continuously ascending circular path.

Ah, taxonomy. How gorgeous you can be.

As we look ahead to the future of WebJunction, we see a broader and broader range of library activity coming under our aegis, as more and more diverse organizations get involved with the project. New possibilities seem to crop up almost every day. In such an environment, organization is likely to be increasingly important. In fact, we could really use the library-world equivalent of the Dewey or LC system to help us organize the domain of library practice we cover. I just found out late last week about LISA (Lib-Info-Science Abstracts) which might be at least part of the answer.

In any case, in relation to some of our activities and for some of our members a consistent, clear, predictable structure is going to be necessary. At the same time, as our audience diversifies along with our content set, it will also be necessary for us to be flexible, dynamic–folksonomical. We are looking at ways to incorporate functionalities like user-defined tagging and at least some degree of wikiability.

[I was in the midst of writing this when I came across this excellent presentation by Gene Smith at Access 2005 in Edmonton. He really takes the whole taxonomy vs. folksonomy question through the paces. Highly recommended if you're musing on such things.]

In fact, we are on the point of launching a mini-wiki in connection with WebJunction’s Technology Watch committee. We met on Friday and it just makes sense to the group to provide some editability by users for many of the articles there. So keep your eyes open for our first quasi-experimental foray into that arena. It will certainly be a bellwether of the kind of functionalities we’re going to need to provide in the future to help strike that balance between, on the one hand, reliable consistent frameworks, and on the other a flexibility and adaptability to meet individual needs and a rapidly changing environment.

So in this regard WebJunction members are an awful like library patrons: many of them can really use some help orienting themselves to a vast world of knowledge, and many others (or the same ones at different times!) need to be empowered to define for themselves the structures that will be useful and provide meaning.

OK, I’m off to SPL to get my daily dose of chartreuse-and-cerise…