This document discusses four areas of research related to social tagging applications. The first focuses on using facets to organize tags in social tagging systems. The second examines how user-generated metadata like tags and reviews can transform library catalogs into social spaces. The third aims to understand user motivations for social tagging. The fourth looks at how social tags could help design library catalogs to meet different cultural community needs.

1. Social tagging,
facets, and social
spaces
Louise Spiteri
School of Information Management
Dalhousie University

2. Research area 1: Faceted navigation
of social tagging applications
 To what
extent can facets be used to facilitate the
organization, display, and retrieval of tags in social
tagging applications?

Includes “traditional” tags, as well as hashtags, geotags,
etc.
ASIST 2011

3. ASIST 2011

4. Facets in Wine.com
ASIST 2011

5. Research area 2: The catalogue as a
social space.
 New
social discovery tools allow for user-generated
metadata, such as tags, reviews, and ratings. These
features can allow clients to share reading, viewing, and
listening interests and to allow library staff to build
resources that reflect these needs.
ASIST 2011

6. Social discovery tools: Observations
 User-generated
content is not being used extensively or
significantly in many social discovery systems.
 List
creation predominates user-generated content.
Ratings, reviews, and tags rank significantly lower.
ASIST 2011

7. Research area 3: Motivation for using
social tagging applications
 Research
on tagging behaviour has focused primarily
on the types and frequency of tags assigned. My
interest is in exploring what motivates people to use
social tagging applications. This question is particularly
important to research question 2, given that the social
features of many social discovery tools are being
underused.
ASIST 2011

8. Research area 4: Social tags to
leverage cultural warrant
 How
can library catalogue records be designed to meet
the different cultural needs of communities?
 When
users add metadata to existing catalogue records
in the form of tags, ratings, or reviews, they are given
the opportunity to express both their needs and their
cultural points-of-view.
ASIST 2011