When thinking about bibliographic data (for example) and social applications using taggings, it’s pretty easy to think that the data (title, author, and so on) is highly structured and therefore very different from tags, which are freeform and all that jazz. In many ways, that’s true, and it’s especially important for the purposes of bibliographic control. But in social applications where users are contributing data, the line can get a lot fuzzier. LibraryThing is an example: users contribute various structured and unstructured data about books. Some of the data comes from libraries or Amazon, some is put in by hand, and some of the library- or publisher-supplied data is cleaned up by users, because it’s not always right. Users can enter structured information in fields—information about the item in general like title and author, but also personal information, like ratings and the date it was read. They can also enter tags and search and sort books by those tags.

Flickr has just introduced “machine tags” (or “triple tags”). These build on existing geotags, which encode locations like this: geo:long=123.456. They’re three-part tags, with a namespace and a key-value pair, and you could use them to express all manner of things—like, for example dc:title=Othello. (There are also some semi-official uses of namespaces on tags in del.icio.us, like system:unfiled and filetype:mp3, and various users have used namespaces and triple tags on services like these without official support.) You might think of them as a kind of really lightweight RDF.

Triple tags really blow away the distinction between structured fields and freeform tags. This is important, because it’s a step along a road in which it’s easier for Joe and Jane User to make sense of complicated sets of data by sorting and filtering. Once you’ve become comfortable searching and sorting your tags, it’s not too much of a stretch to apply the same tools to more structured data. Sure, maybe it’s the same data that’s always been there, but now maybe Jane User could be better at manipulating it because she doesn’t have to understand “databases”, she just has grok “tags”, along with a little lightweight syntax. It’s just a different way of looking at the data, one that might prove more friendly. I know not all the tools are there yet, and I’m certainly not saying that everybody’s grandma is going to be putting machine tags on Flickr tomorrow, but I think this is a step in the right direction.

When people come to the library, that’s a good thing. But, sometimes lots of people at the library can mean the library gets noisy with people working together or just chatting. People who’ve come to the library for some peace and quiet to get work done can be disturbed.

The solutions to this problem are usually to have quiet study rooms that can be closed off, and/or to formally designate or subtly design for group spaces where it’s OK to talk a little bit separate from quiet spaces. Today, I saw a pretty clever additional idea from my undergraduate alma mater: noise-canceling headphones you can check out to use while you’re in the library. Cool!

I’ve seen the phrase “venture capital” bandied about in reference to Vista Equity Partners’ recent acquisition of SirsiDynix (pdf), and the earlier acquisition of Ex Libris/Endeavor by Francisco Partners. Venture capital is a somewhat nebulous term, meaning different things to different people. Since the rise and fall of the dot-com era, however, it’s most often applied to capital offered to start-ups, anticipating large returns for the relatively high risk of investment. It provides an infusion of cash to a new or small company, enabling innovation. Sometimes “venture capital” is also applied to an investment in a beleaguered company in order to turn it around, which can be similarly high risk/high reward.

Though I can appreciate the hopes of library automation customers that the recent acquisitions may signal an infusion of cash that will fuel innovation, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. These are buyouts by private equity firms of large, established companies. Although we sometimes talk about the state of library automation software in terms that might be described as “beleaguered”, I’m not really sure that describes these companies’ financial situations.

It may indeed be the case that Vista Equity Partners and Francisco Partners intend to invest resources into these companies to make them better and more profitable, and if so, I think that’s great. (I, for one, welcome our new private equity firm overlords.) On the other hand, these acquisitions could be an example of what’s known as leveraged buyout, a strategy by which private equity firms acquire companies by borrowing against the assets they acquire. Often this involves paying themselves a big cash dividend, and then doing just enough to keep the company afloat under the sometimes excessive debt burdens they have inflicted during the acquisition, and attempting to sell it off again in a year or two.

I’m not saying I know which will happen, or even which is more likely. I didn’t do much research about Vista and Francisco’s previous acquisitions and what’s happened to them. I just wanted to make the point that we ought not look at acquisition of large companies like these the same way we look at VCs financing a startup. In these sorts of deals, there’s often a lot of fancy accounting going on that obscures the motives.