Tagging Practices and Their Value

Tagging Practices on Research Oriented Social Bookmarking Sites by Margaret E.I. Kipp (mkipp@uwo.ca) Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Delivered at Canadian Association for Information Science 2007 (CAIS/ACSI)

[Also available through http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011413/ ]

"Abstract: This paper examines the tagging practices evident on CiteULike, a research oriented social bookmarking site for journal articles. Tagging practices were examined using standard informetric measures for analysis of bibliographic information and term use. Additionally, tags were compared to author keywords and descriptors assigned to the same article."

Shows that user tagging can enhance findability over full-text search by keyword and indexing with controlled vocabulary.

Conclusion: "The differing terminology use in tag lists suggests that tagging may be a working example of Vannevar Bush's associative trails. He argued that associative trails better represented how users actually work with their documents: by association rather than by categorisation. (Bush 1945) This suggests that user tagging could provide additional access points to traditional controlled vocabularies and provide users with the associative classifications necessary to tie documents and articles to time and task relationships as well as other associations which are new and novel."