John Wenzler, LibraryThing and the Library Catalog: Adding Collective Intelligence to the OPAC (Workshop on Next Generation Libraries, San Francisco State CARL NITIG; 7 september 2007):

"The Goal: Enhancing the Catalog with Web 2.0 Technologies
Web 2.0 theorists argue that Internet technologies now allow us to harness the “Wisdom of the Crowd” in unprecedented ways. Successful online experiments such as Wikipedia demonstrate that the collective knowledge of millions of users can produce reference works that are more comprehensive than traditional reference sources produced by a small group of experts. Similarly, “folksonomies,” which use the judgment of the crowd to organize documents, have worked extremely well on popular Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr , del.icio.ous, and LibraryThing. By collecting and analyzing the private descriptions – the tags – that users add to their own photos, URLs, and books, these sites generate valuable metadata about public documents and resources."

Via Wadingln