The use of collaborative tagging in public library catalogues

One of the most daunting challenges of information management in the digital world is the ability to keep, or re-find relevant information; bookmarking is one of the most popular methods for storing relevant Web information for re-access and re-use (Jones, Dumais, & Bruce, 2002; Bruce, Jones, & Dumais, 2004). The rising popularity of social bookmark managers, such as Del.icio.us, addresses these concerns by allowing users to organize their bookmarks in a way that reflects directly their own vocabulary and needs. In recent years, significant developments have occurred in the creation of customizable user features in public library catalogues. These features offer clients the opportunity to customize their own library web page and to store items of interest to them, such as book lists. Client participation in these interfaces, however, is largely reactive; clients can select items from the catalogue, but they have little ability to organize and categorize these items in a way that reflects their own needs and language. Organize personal information space: Allow users of public library catalogues to create and organize their own personal information space in the catalogue. Users find items of interest (items in the library catalogue, citations from external databases, external web pages, etc.) and store, maintain, and organize them in the catalogue using their own tags. Supplement existing controlled vocabularies: Allow users to supplement the existing subject headings in the catalogue (normally Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH) with their own tags in their personal information space. LCSH headings may not always be intuitive to users, e.g., LCSH uses the heading Cookery, a term that most people would probably be unlikely to choose over the more intuitive Cooking; likewise, LCSH uses Motion Pictures, where most users would probably use films or movies. The purpose of this project is to examine the application of folksonomies to organizing the personal information spaces, and to supplementing LCSH. In order to understand more fully the potential applications of folksonomies to public library catalogues, it is important to examine how folksonomies are structured and used, and the extent to which they reflect user needs not found in existing lists of subject headings. The purpose of this research is thus to examine: The structure and scope of folksonomies. How are the tags that constitute the folksonomies structured? To what extent does this structure reflect and differ from the norms used in the construction of subject headings such as LCSH? What are strengths and weaknesses of folksonomies (e.g., reflect user need, ambiguous headings, redundant headings, etc.)? The extent to which LCSH headings reflect user-derived folksonomies. How much overlap exists between LCSH headings and popular tags? How well do LCSH headings mirror user-derived tags for similar concepts? Folksonomies are user-created metadata, or grassroots community classification of digital assets. Folksonomies are found in social bookmarks managers such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and Furl (http://www.furl.net/), which allow users to add sites they like to their personal collections of links, to organize and categorize these sites by adding their own terms, or tags, and to share this collection with other people with the same interests. The growing popularity of folksonomies can be attributed to at least two principal factors: An increasing need to exert control over the mass of digital information that we accumulate on a daily basis, and a desire to democratize the way in which digital information is described and organized by using categories and terminology that reflect the views and needs of the actual end-users, rather than those of an external organization or body. In recent years, significant developments have occurred in the creation of library portals that enable some degree of client personalization (Calhoun, 2002; Lakos & Gray, 2000; Michalko, 2004). Many libraries have developed customizable user interfaces to allow clients to create their own library gateway of relevant resources and services; the level of client participation is limited, however, to only very basic functions, such as storing account information (e.g., name and address), and creating very rudimentary book lists. Demspey (2003) and Ketchall (2000) recommend that clients be allowed to annotate resources of interest and to share these annotations with other clients with similar interests. Studies of folksonomies have thus been conducted primarily in the field of Information Architecture, and have consisted of mostly anecdotal observations. There has been little examination of folksonomies within Library and Information Science (LIS). The seemingly uncontrolled nature of folksonomies may appear daunting to a field that emphasizes control and authority in the indexing of objects; on the other hand, their understanding of indexing and indexing languages makes information professionals within LIS the best candidates to study folksonomies. The combination of folksonomies and controlled vocabularies will be a valuable tool in the continuing development of client-based customizable features in library catalogues. (a)Analysis of the structure of the tags against the guidelines established in section 6 of NISO's guidelines for thesaurus construction (NISO, 2005). Section 6 provides guidelines pertaining to: The scope of terms (homographs) The form of terms (single/multiword terms; types of concepts) The grammatical form of terms (nouns, noun phrases, verbal nouns adjectives, and adverbs) The selection of preferred forms (acronyms, abbreviations, full spelling, and spelling variations) (b) Formation of conceptual clusters to determine the main conceptual groupings of the folksonomies, for example, the terms films, movies, and cinema all cluster around one concept. Similarly, variant spellings of a term cluster around one concept, as do verbal, adjectival, or noun forms of terms (e.g., weblogs, blogs, and blogging). The formation of these clusters will be done manually and separately by both the principal research and the research assistant, and then compared in order to obtain clusters both found in common. (c) A list of unique tags derived from the three sites will be compiled (e.g., the term blogs is likely to appear in all three sites) (d) The LSCH subject authority files (http://authorities.loc.gov) will be consulted in order to find the closest matching equivalents to the list of unique tags derived in (c) above. Notice will be made of exact matches, equivalent terms used to express the same concept, and the absence of equivalent LCSH headings.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.