Journal article
User tags versus expert-assigned subject terms: A comparison of LibraryThing tags and Library of Congress Subject Headings
Journal of information science, v 36(6), pp 763-779
01 Dec 2010
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
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.
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Details
- Title
- User tags versus expert-assigned subject terms: A comparison of LibraryThing tags and Library of Congress Subject Headings
- Creators
- Caimei Lu - Drexel UniversityJung-ran Park - Drexel UniversityXiaohua Hu - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Journal of information science, v 36(6), pp 763-779
- Publisher
- Sage
- Number of pages
- 17
- Grant note
- IMLS 239667 / PA Dept of Health 90920005 / NSFC; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) NSF IIS 0448023; CCF 0905291; IIP 0934197 / NSF; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000285087200007
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-78650096650
- Other Identifier
- 991019168157404721
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Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Information Systems
- Information Science & Library Science