The exploitation of social tagging in libraries

Abstract

Nowadays, many libraries have developed social tagging services, after the considerable use of social tagging and deployment as key components of Web 2.0. Another set of libraries have enriched the search and indexing services of their OPACs with the folksonomy of Library Thing. The evaluation of these metadata (folksonomies) and further their exploitation is one of our challenges. At the same time, we explore ways to define a methodology for the exploitation of user’s vocabulary by the traditional indexing systems maintained by information organizations. Firstly, our research focused on the user acceptance for the OPACIAL an OPAC 2.0 with social tagging functionalities. The users’ behavior was studied by qualitative evaluation using questionnaires and structured interviews. Social tags are then analyzed and categorized to identify the users’ needs. After finding that a large number of tags consist new terms for the authority file of a Library, these tags were searched in other authority files. The research was completed by developing a methodology for social tagging evaluation and a proposal for developing policies to integrate social tags in their indexing processes. Moving to a new study, librarians - cataloguers assessed the value of the semantics of inserted tags and also investigated the possibility of using them for the subject indexing. Before the new experiment a new set of tags from LibraryThing’s folksonomy had been added to the library. The experiment aimed to compare the two vocabularies and the participants recommended to develop the cooperation with users’ communities in matters of terminology and apodosis of scientific terms.