First, I want to thank Philip who commented on my post last week and brought up the term “controlled vocabulary”. It made me start thinking about the connection between tags on bookmarking sites and CV, and luckily, the readings in this session help me a lot in understanding my concern.
In Tagging Video: Conventions and Strategies of the YouTube Community, the authors took YouTube’s tagging system as an example to show us the two main reasons why social tagging system is a necessity: fast growing speed of the items and the difficulties in cataloging or classifying them with a established professional cataloging or classification system. Although the authors only referred to resources like digital videos or moving images, I think the two reasons they concluded can also be applied to resources like websites or web pages, as those in De.li.cious.
According to the instruction from De.li.cious, tags here are “one-word descriptors” that can be used to organize bookmarks. They “do not form a hierarchy” and can be applied as many as one can to a particular bookmark. Basically, they’re keywords that users created or modified by themselves, like what Geisler and Burns called as “assigned free-form terms”. And the advantages of these tags, cited from De.li.cious, are “driven by personal interests” and “more flexible than fitting information into preconceived categories or folders”.
Speaking of preconceived categories, or professional cataloging and classification terms, the first one that popped up in my mind is the Library of Congress Subject Headings. As an authentic and commonly used system, these authorized headings play an important role in bibliographic control in libraries, and help librarians to “collect, organize and disseminate documents” in an effective way. However, it seems that there are few social network sites or online communities are consulting LCSH when intitling their tags. The situation could be due to a number of reasons, but it is also an interesting phenomenon when some of these self-generated tags are also terms in LCSH.
Therefore, in order to compare between the “LCSH-tags” and “non-LCSH-tags” to see if there are any kinds of relationship, I chose the top 38 tags from the Popular Tag Cloud in De.li.cious.
Among these tags, there are 23 that can be found as Subject Headings in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, and 15 that can’t. There are several conditions that can be confusing. For example, the tag “web” is not a Subject Heading because “web” is too board as a term in LCSH, instead, there are Subject Headings like “web archiving”, “web browsing”, or “WEB (Computer program language)”. “Reference” is not found either but there is a corresponding Subject Heading of “reference and research services”. Also, “development” is not a Subject Heading because there are Subject Headings like “development and education”, “development associates” and etc. At the same time, although some tags can also be found in LCSHs, the meaning of the same term could be different. Like “mac”, as a tag in De.li.cious, it is mostly related to the operating system of Apple’s Macintosh, but as a Subject Heading, it is the pseudonym of mario medina correa.
Also LCSH | Not LCSH | Also LCSH | Not LCSH | Also LCSH | |
design | blog | web2.0 | development | technology | |
tools | video | news | travel | ||
music | software | inspiration | flash | shopping | |
programming | web design | photography | blogs | books | |
art | reference | food | tips | mac | |
how to | tutorial | css | politics | science | |
javascript | web | education | opensources | games | |
linux | free | business |
However, it is Interesting that the result of overlapping is more than I expected. Given the fact that these 38 tags are the most popular ones in De.li.cious, the relatively high rate could be due to conformity. Users tend to pick normal or formal terms when they form a tag because it will be easier for them to identify and classify both the groups and individual items. So, there is a big chance these tags can be found in LCSHs, because LCSHs are also conventionally generated from common terms. Therefore, it is hard to deduce or imagine the number of tags that are also LCSHs among the rest of the tags in De.li.cious, we can even suppose that there would be fewer among the less popular ones, and little among the least popular one, for the fact that the less popular tags might be either individualized or indicate newly emerging information that few people know.
And the factor of some newly emerging information is existing, especially when it comes to websites, is quite a big reason why free-form tags should be existing. If there are terms that none of those professional cataloging and classification system had come out with, these tags could be great complement to De.li.cious or any other sites. In addition, another advantage of free-form tags is that professional cataloging and classification could be hard for general users. It might takes a long time for the users to memorize, or even to learn all the standard terms, and probably will frustrate them. Moreover, free-form tags gives personalization to tags and can form characteristic of the community. According to Geisler and Burns, since it “enable all members of the community to see the tags that have been previously used to describe content”, this sharing feature can enhance a sense of belonging of the community among the users.
The disadvantages of free-form tags, however, is that they might be non-standard and reduplicated sometimes. Like in the case above where there are both the tag of “blog” and “blogs” in the top 38 popular tags. It is the users personal choice to use which tag but somehow will cause confusion when searching for information or doing researches. So in general, I think the social tagging system and professional cataloging and classification systems can work as complementary supplements to each other, to create a most effective, easy-to-use, and “fancier” tagging system.
Reference:
http://www.delicious.com/help/faq#tags
http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v4n1/geisler/geisler.html
http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First
