Binary in the Library: Collaborative Tagging

by Rebecca S. Wolsk

Image credit: © Gstudio Group | Dreamstime.com

Collaborative tagging is keyword-classification by users (particularly bloggers and social media users) to sort and share content.

This has been called folksonomy, in contrast to taxonomy, in which professionals (particularly indexers and cataloguers) pre-establish consistent hierarchies of relationally-linked keywords. Knowledge management consultant Aprill Allen explained the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy, and cited tension that sometimes emerged in discussions about their differences (Allen, 2012).

In researching, I expected to find more tension, but for the most part discovered a synergistic trend. Libraries and corporate software developers have incorporated the strengths of both folksonomy and taxonomy: collaborative tagging’s intuitive socialness, and taxonomy’s comprehensive reliability.

COLLABORATIVE TAGGING ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

The Most Conventional Context

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Most tweets and Instagram updates include hashtags—not only for emphasis, but so that anyone who does a search on the hashtag can find that topic. On etsy, craftspeople use tags for marketing.

LIBRARY ADOPTION OF SOCIAL TAGGING AS A DISCOVERY TOOL

Many libraries incorporate collaborative tagging. New York Public Library uses BiblioCommons, University of Pennsylvania Library has PennTags.

On Flickr, libraries use The Commons to leverage social media for tagging huge image archives. In the vastness of Flickr, some user may know something unique about old, obscure portraits and places (Morris, 2012).

COLLABORATIVE TAGGING IN ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Microsoft SharePoint permits collaborative tagging so companies benefit from both expertly-added, efficient terms, and also less-regimented yet intuitive tags. WareITis’s Records Studio search accepts both traditional Boolean operators and tags. Knowledge management consultancies blog about businesses using this dual-track functionality.

CONCLUSION

Since taxonomies and folksonomies have different attributes, it’s smart that corporations and libraries use both rather than replacing professionals with crowdsourcing. Information systems/online search expert Steven E. Arnold has asserted the continuing need for skilled knowledge management in Training Your Smart Search System (Arnold, 2014). Similarly, opportunities abound for information professionals in the area of algorithm-based tagging.

FOR DISCUSSION

Think of an online space with which you’re familiar. Do you see more synergy or conflict between folksonomy and taxonomy within its search and discovery sections?

REFERENCE LIST

Allen, A. (2012, December 5). Taxonomies and folksonomies [Web log post].
Retrieved from http://knowledgebird.com/taxonomies-and-folksonomies/

Arnold, S. (2014, August 2). Training your smart search system [Web

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http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2014/08/02/training-your-smart-search-system/

Ferguson, C. (2009). Technology left behind: Social cataloging and the

library OPAC [Article 51] Against the Grain, 21(1), 88-91. Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2534&context=atg

Golder, S., & Huberman, B. (2005, August). The structure of

collaborative tagging systems (Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs Technical Report). Retrieved from HP Labs website: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/tags/tags.pdf

Kakali, C., & Papatheodorou, C. (2011). The exploitation of social

tagging in libraries. Paper presented at the First Workshop on Digital Information Management, Corfu, Greece. Retrieved from http://eprints.rclis.org/15850/1/07.Kakali.pdf

Kintivo. (n.d.). Taxonomy and folksonomy: Sharepoint taxonomy and

folksonomy [Web log post]. Retrieved from

https://www.sharepointams.com/en/Blog/Pages/Taxonomy-and-Folksonomy.aspx

Morris, F. (2012, February 9). Time flies! Celebrating 4 years of The

Commons on Flickr [Web log post]. Retrieved from

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/02/09/time-flies-celebrating-4-years-of-the-commons-on-flickr/

New York Public Library. (n.d.). Introducing NYPL’s new catalog [Web

page]. Retrieved on October 6, 2014 from

http://www.nypl.org/bibliocommons-faq

Ozturk, P., & Han, Y. (2014, June). Similar, Yet Diverse: A

Recommender System. Paper presented at Collective Intelligence

2014 conference, Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from http://humancomputation.com/ci2014/papers/Active%20Papers%5CPaper%2058.pdf