This Is a Job for... a Cognitive Librarian!

Okay, so remember that post wherein I wished someone would do a research project about people's idiosyncratic filing systems, how they think about the organization of their home libraries, and so on? Well, there is a website that does something similar: Library Thing. Unsystematic, but interesting. In fact, probably most interesting because it's unsystematic.

(It strikes me that I could probably stand to do a bit of research before posting some of my brilliant ideas. But I probably won't, because the thing that gets me interested enough to do the research... is the musing.)

(It also strikes me to wonder what insights a cognitive psychologist might bring to filing system research.)

Ezra Pound apparently experimented with a truly idiosyncratic filing system: he would hang things off the ceiling by strings. I wonder what Pound would have made of a "tag cloud"; and I wonder further what use a research library could make of such a thing. Also, somewhere I've seen a sort of "dynamic cloud" that shifted links three-dimensionally as I clicked through it... it was neat, but I couldn't think for the life of me how what problem it solved. I also can't remember what it was called, or where it was.

What a mess this post is.