Exploitation of folksonomies in subject analysis

Abstract

Social tagging is one of the most popular of social media applications and has attracted the interest of a number of libraries and museums, which have developed services that facilitate user-community collaboration. This paper presents a methodology for the exploitation of social tagging in subject indexing, and explores that method through a case study in an academic library setting. The findings reveal the characteristics of users' tagging behavior, which mainly enhances the subject description of documents. The results suggest the articulation of alternative policies concerning knowledge organization schemes, technological infrastructures, and information services. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.