Could social tags enrich the library subject index?

Abstract

Social tagging aims to generate folksonomies through the users’ collaboration and activation. This paper is motivated by the trend of several libraries to adopt social tagging functionalities and presents a tag analysis study aiming to exploit a social tag collection for the benefit of the subject description of an academic library material. In this context, cataloguers are interviewed to assess the semantic value of the concepts expressed by the set of social tags and discuss the possibility of their incorporation in the well-formed and structured library authority file.