Social tagging, as a recent approach for creating metadata, has caught the attention of library and information science researchers. Many researchers recommend incorporating social tagging into the library environment and combining folksonomies with formal classification. However, some researchers are concerned with the quality issues of social annotation because of its uncontrolled nature. In this study, we compare social tags created by users from the LibraryThing website with the subject terms assigned by experts according to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The purpose of this study is to examine the difference and connections between social tags and expert-assigned subject terms and further explore the feasibility and obstacles of implementing social tagging in library systems. The results of our study show that it is possible to use social tags to improve the accessibility of library collections. However, the existence of non-subject-related tags may impede the application of social tagging in traditional library cataloguing systems.
S. Golder and B.A. Huberman, Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems, Journal of Information Science32(2) (2006) 198-208.
2.
T.V. Wal, Folksonomy coinage and definition (2007). Available at: http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html (accessed 2 June 2008).
3.
J.-r. Park and C. Lu , Application of semi-automatic metadata generation: types, tools, and techniques, Library and Information Science Research31(4) (2009) 225-231.
4.
J. Trant, Tagging, folksonomy and art museums: results of steve.museum’s research . Available at: http://conference.archimuse.com/jtrants/stevemuseum_research_report_available (accessed 25 June 2010).
5.
G.W. Furnas , T.K. Landauer, L.M. Gomez and S.T. Dumais, The vocabulary problem in human-system communication, Communications of the ACM30(11) (November 1987) 964-971.
6.
A. Zollers , Emerging motivations for tagging expression, performance, and activism, Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop, WWW2007 (Banff, Alberta , Canada, May 2007).
7.
J. Furner, User tagging of library resources: toward a framework for system evaluation , World Library and Information Congress: 73RD IFLA General Conference and Council ( Durban , South Africa, 2007).
8.
F.M. Suchanek , M. Vojnovic and D. Gunawardena, Social tags: meaning and suggestions , Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Napa Valley, California, USA, 2008), CIKM’08 ( ACM, New York) 223-232.
9.
A. Mathes , Folksonomies - cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata (2004). Computer Mediated Communication. Available at: www.adammathes.com/academic/computermediated-communication/folksonomies.html (accessed 20 April 2008).
10.
G. Macgregor and E. McCulloch, Collaborative tagging as a knowledge organization and resource discovery tool, Library Review55(5) (2006) 291-300.
11.
P.J. Rolla , User tags versus subject headings: can user-supplied data improve subject access to library collections?Library Resources and Technical Services53(3) (2009) 174-184.
12.
T. Steele , The new cooperative cataloging, Library Hi Tech27(1) (2009) 68-77.
13.
S. Hayman and N. Lothian, Taxonomy directed folksonomies: integrating user tagging and controlled vocabularies for australian education networks, World Library and Information Congress: 73RD IFLA General Conference and Council ( Durban, South Africa, 2007).
14.
S. Bao , X. Wu , B. Fei , G. Xue , Z. Su and Y. Yu , Optimizing web search using social annotations , Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web (Banff , Alberta, Canada, 2007) WWW ’07 (ACM, New York ) 501-510.
15.
D. Zhou, J. Bian, S. Zheng, H. Zha and C.L. Giles, Exploring social annotations for information retrieval, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web ( Beijing, China, 2008) WWW’08 (ACM , New York) 715-724.
16.
S. Xu, S. Bao, Y. Cao and Y. Yu, Using Social annotations to improve language model for information retrieval , Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Lisboa , Portugal, 2007) CIKM'07 (ACM, New York) 1003-1006.
17.
R. Jaschke , L. Marinho, A. Hotho, L. Schmidt-Thieme and G. Stumme, Tag recommendations in folksonomies, Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (Warsaw, Poland, 2007) PKDD’07 (Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg) 506-514.
18.
Y. Song, Z. Zhuang, H. Li, Q. Zhao, J. Li, W.-C. Lee and C.L. Giles, Real-time automatic tag recommendation, Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (Singapore, 2008) SIGIR’08 (ACM, New York) 515-522.
19.
Z. Yin , R. Li , Q. Mei and J. Han , Exploring social tagging graph for web object classification, Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Paris, France, 2009) KDD’09 (ACM, New York) 957-966.
20.
D. Ramage, P. Heymann, C.D. Manning and H. Garcia-Molina, Clustering the tagged web, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining ( Barcelona, Spain, 2009) WSDM’09 ( ACM, New York) 54-63.
21.
P. Heymann , G. Koutrika and H. Garcia-Molina, Can social bookmarking improve web search?, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining (Palo Alto, California, USA, 2008) WSDM’08 ( ACM, New York) 195-206.
22.
K. Bischoff , C.S. Firan, W. Nejdl and R. Paiu, Can all tags be used for search?, Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (Napa Valley, California, USA, 2008) CIKM’08 (ACM, New York) 203-212.
23.
H.S. Al-Khalifa and H.C. Davis, Measuring the semantic value of folksonomies , Proceedings of the Second International IEEE Conference on Innovations in Information Technology ( Dubai , UAE, 2006).
24.
C. Lu, J.-r. Park, X. Hu and I.-Y. Song, Metadata effectiveness: a comparison between user-created social tags and author-provided metadata, Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ( Hawaii , USA, 2010).
25.
K. Yi, and L.M. Chan, Linking folksonomy to Library of Congress subject headings: an exploratory study, Journal of Documentation65 (6) (2009) 872-900.
26.
T. Smith, Cataloging and you: measuring the efficacy of a folksonomy for subject analysis , The 18th Workshop of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in Classification Research (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2007 ).
27.
P Heymann and H Garcia-Molina, Contrasting controlled vocabulary and tagging: do experts choose the right names to label the wrong things?Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining (Barcelona , Spain, 2009) WSDM’09 (ACM, New York).
28.
L.F. Spiteri , The use of folksonomies in public library catalogues , The Serials Librarian51(2) (2006) 75-89.
29.
M. Pera, W. Lund and Y. Ng, A sophisticated library search strategy using folksonomies and similarity matching, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology60(7) (2009) 1392- 1406.
30.
J. Hunter, I. Khan and A. Gerber, Harvana: harvesting community tags to enrich collection metadata , Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2008) JCDL’08 (ACM, New York ) 147-156.
31.
L. Allen and M. Winkler, PennTags-social bookmarking in an academic environment ( 2006 ). Available at: www.diglib.org/forums/fall2006/presentations/winkler-2006-11.pdf (accessed 15 March 2008).
32.
J. Wenzler , LibraryThing and the library catalog: adding collective intelligence to the OPAC, A Workshop on Next Generation Libraries, CARL NITIG (San Francisco , USA, 2007).
33.
M.E.I. Kipp , and D.G. Campbell, Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems: an examination of tagging practices, Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology ( Austin, TX, USA, 2006).
34.
M.E.I. Kipp , @toread and cool: tagging for time, task and emotion, Proceedings of the 8th Information Architecture Summit ( Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2007).
