Journal of Information and Knowledge (Formerly SRELS Journal of Information Management)

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Social Tags Versus Controlled Vocabularies: A Comparative Metadata Analysis


Affiliations
1 Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata - 700032, West Bengal, India
     

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With the advent of technology, the tagging has gained popularity. Many researchers believe that social tags, #hashtag may increase the use of library collections. The present study examines the similarities and differences between the Library of Congress’s Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors and social tags. The study also sought to know whether social tags can be implemented in the library’s database or not. This paper focuses on the comparison between social tags collected from social cataloguing site Library Thing and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors collected from Library of Congress online catalogue. For this study more than a hundred book titles in the domain of philosophy were collected from the two selected databases. The results suggest that if the social tags are more subjects oriented, it could improve the subject access to books in libraries; but it cannot substitute the controlled vocabulary like Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Keywords

Controlled Vocabulary, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Library Thing, Social Tagging, Social Tags, Spearman’s Correlation.
User
About The Authors

Arindam Sarkar
Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata - 700032, West Bengal
India

Udayan Bhattacharya
Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata - 700032, West Bengal
India


Notifications

  • Bogers, T. and Petras, V. (2017). Supporting book search: A comprehensive comparison of tags vs. controlled vocabulary metadata. Data and Information Management, 1(1): 17–34.

  • Chowdhury, G. G. and Chowdhury, S. (2003). Introduction to digital libraries. London: Facet Publishing.

  • Lee, D. H. and Schleyer, T. (2010). A Comparison of MeSH Terms and CiteULike Social Tags as Metadata for the Same Items. In: IHI ‘10: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium. ACM, New York, NY, USA; p. 445-48.

  • Library of Congress (2020). Library of Congress. Retrieved April 26, 2020. https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/ searchKeyword?editSearchId=33598.

  • Library Thing (2020). Library Thing. Retrieved April 24, 2020. https://www.librarything.com/.

  • Lu, C., Park, J.-R. and Hu, X. (2010). User tags versus expert assigned subject terms: A comparison of Library Thing Tags and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Journal of Information Science, 36(6): 763-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551510386173.

  • Metadata (n.d.). Metadata. Retrieved May 2, 2020, from https://techterms.com/definition/metadata, https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/metadata.

  • Samanta, K. S. and Rath, D. S. (2019). Social tags versus LCSH descriptors: A comparative metadata analysis in the Field of Economics. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 34(4): 145-51.

  • Stephanie (2016). Statistics How To. Retrieved April 29, 2020. https://www.statisticshowto.datasciencecentral.com/jaccard-index/.


Abstract Views: 363

PDF Views: 11




  • Social Tags Versus Controlled Vocabularies: A Comparative Metadata Analysis

Abstract Views: 363  |  PDF Views: 11

Authors

Arindam Sarkar
Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata - 700032, West Bengal, India
Udayan Bhattacharya
Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata - 700032, West Bengal, India

Abstract


With the advent of technology, the tagging has gained popularity. Many researchers believe that social tags, #hashtag may increase the use of library collections. The present study examines the similarities and differences between the Library of Congress’s Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors and social tags. The study also sought to know whether social tags can be implemented in the library’s database or not. This paper focuses on the comparison between social tags collected from social cataloguing site Library Thing and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors collected from Library of Congress online catalogue. For this study more than a hundred book titles in the domain of philosophy were collected from the two selected databases. The results suggest that if the social tags are more subjects oriented, it could improve the subject access to books in libraries; but it cannot substitute the controlled vocabulary like Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Keywords


Controlled Vocabulary, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Library Thing, Social Tagging, Social Tags, Spearman’s Correlation.

References