#socialtagging: Defining its role in the academic library

Department of Library and Information Studies

Today’s information seeker and user

Expects the ability to participate and interact in an online environment

Is now both a consumer and contributor of information

Information literacy is closely attached to themselves and their work

Has an increasingly diverse demographic

Needs new ways to access information2

What is social tagging?

User generated annotations and subject search terms

Also known as: collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, folksonomy, social annotation

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Tagging WebsitesSocial tagging websites cover a wide range

of topics and cater to both social networking and academia:

– www.Delicious.com– www.Librarything.com– www.Diigo.com– www.CiteULike.com– www.Connotea.com– www.Goodreads.com– www.Flickr.com (images)

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Benefits of tagging

Created using “plain” language

Removes barrier between user and document

Flexible and easy to edit

Encourages a sense of community

Engages the user in the knowledge retrieval

Can be: Personalized for user’s own reference Structured for broad access

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The dark side of tagging

No authority control

Spam tagging—“spagging”

Lose track of assigned tags—“information closets”

Incorrectly or inappropriately tagged documents

Staying power of tagging?

Digital divide6

What about subject headings?

Pros: Cons:Highly structured

Eliminates sense ambiguity

Standardized, high quality

Longevity

React slowly to new concepts and changes

Difficult for non-experts to use for formulating queries

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Tagging in the academic library

Provides a new way to interact with the catalog

Social tagging complements subject headings. More access points that may be more user friendly

Tags are used to start the search, subject headings are used to retrieve the related records

Suggestions for tags from the vocabulary

Participation is key

Should be easy for people to contribute

“Make tagging fun and useful, not just a chore” (Steele 2009 p.76)8

PennTagsHosted and developed by University of

Pennsylvania

Penn community members can tag web sites, articles in the library’s database, video and OPAC catalog records

“Add to PennTags” link available at the bottom of any resource page in the library

Caters to traditional users and those seeking a new way of interacting with the catalog

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Tagroll

Tag cloud

ConclusionThe “aboutness” of an object is determined by

many people allowing more access points

Social tagging is not meant to replace subject headings but serves as a complement to enhance access to collections

Can provide insight for understanding the information needs and interests of library users Supports participatory librarianship

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ReferencesGoh, Dion, Foo, Schubert. Social information retrieval systems: Emerging technologies

and applications for searching the Web effectively /Hershey: Information Science Reference, c2008

Jank, David. "Toward a Unifying Ontology for Human-Information Interaction / Vers une unification ontologique dans le domaine de l'interaction humaine avec l'information." Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 34.4 (2010): 403-432. Project MUSE. Web. 22 Jan. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Kakali, C., & Papatheodorou, C. (2010). Exploitation of Folksonomies in Subject Analysis. Library & Information Science Research , 192-202.

Lu, C., Park, J., & Hu, X. (2010). User tags versus expert-assigned subject terms: a comparison of librarything tags and library of congress subject headings. Journal of Information Science, 36(6), doi: 10.1177/0165551510386173

Matthews, B., Jones, C., Puzon, B., Moon, J., Tudhope, D., Golub, K., et al. (2010). An Evaluation of Enhancing Social Tagging with a Knowledge Organization System. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Penntags. (2005, October 11). Retrieved from http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

Steele, T. (2009). The new cooperative catalog. Library Hi Tech, 27(1), doi: 10.1108/07378830910942928

Ying, D., Jacob, E. K., Zhixiong, Z., Foo, S., Erjia, Y., George, N. L., & Lijiang, G. (2009). Perspectives on social tagging. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60(12), 2388. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.12

Questions

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#socialtagging: Defining its role in the academic library