Thomas Mann on the importance of subject headings

Syracuse Library School student Joshua Kitlas has posted a short, informative interview of Library of Congress reference librarian Thomas Mann on his blog, Kitlas. Mann touches on how important Library of Congress subject headings are to the reference librarian, and how social tagging will never fill that need.

There is so much more to search than Google or OCLC.
You need to see relationships between subjects and their headings. Tags
by users are simply no substitute. They’re okay as supplements to
controlled vocabularies but not substitutes.
There’s a need to go beyond the internet and look at the systems
librarians and publishers have developed that are not accessible by
Google or the other engines.

It's an interesting view that maybe Google may not be able to replace the tools that librarians and publishers have created over the years.

From librarian.net