Bookdrop tagging

This lit­tle mockup almost speaks for itself:

Almost… but not quite. The story it rep­re­sents is really remark­able. Nina Simon explains:

Haar­lem Oost is a branch library in the Nether­lands that wanted to encour­age vis­i­tors to add tags […] to the books they read. […] To do this, the library didn’t cre­ate a com­pli­cated com­puter sys­tem or send peo­ple online. Instead, they installed more book drops and return shelves, labeled with dif­fer­ent descrip­tors like “bor­ing,” “great for kids,” “funny,” etc.

Is that great or what? Phys­i­cal tag­ging! It feels like the infor­ma­tional equiv­a­lent of turn­ing a dance floor into a piezo­elec­tric power gen­er­a­tor. But alas—the library has now aban­doned the sys­tem. Why?

[…] peo­ple were using the sys­tem so seri­ously that it took them a lot of time per book to decide where to place it. That caused some logis­tic prob­lems in the (small) build­ing, espe­cially as they have some peak times.

It’s clear to me that this is a totally beau­ti­ful, clever mechanism—it makes me want to use the too-snooty term of art “intervention”—that just needed a lit­tle extra engi­neer­ing. There’s a great com­ment thread over at Nina’s blog that dives in even deeper.

One Response

Tim Maly says:
January 6, 2010 at 10:27 am
So, this made me real­ize that we’ve been doing this for years with garbage and recy­cling. Some cities have revamped their tag­ging sys­tem sev­eral times (Toronto had blue bins and garbage, then blue bins, black bins and garbage, then blue, black, green and garbage and now blue, green and garbage).
There’s a mix­ture of crowd sourc­ing and then expert cura­tion (the experts are poorly paid work­ers at facil­i­ties sort­ing through our coarsely sorted garbage).
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