Exploring user-contributed metadata's potential to enhance access to literary works

Abstract

Academic libraries have moved toward providing social networking features, such as tagging, in their library catalogs. To explore whether user tags can enhance access to individual literary works, the author obtained a sample of individual works of English and American literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a large academic library catalog and searched them in LibraryThing. The author compared match rates, the availability of subject headings and tags across various literary forms, and the terminology used in tags versus controlled-vocabulary headings on a subset of records. In addition, she evaluated the usefulness of available LibraryThing tags for the library catalog records that lacked subject headings. Options for utilizing the subject terms available in sources outside the local catalog also are discussed.