Libraries and the Hive Mind: Folksonomies and Tagging

Slide 1: Libraries and the Hive Mind Folksonomies & Tagging Ellyssa Kroski Metropolitan New York Library Council June 17, 2008

Slide 2: Tagging on the Web

Slide 3: Tag Pronunciation: tăg Transitive verb: 1. To categorize content online. 2. To add descriptive keywords, categories, or labels to online objects for future retrieval or findability. Inflected forms: tag·ging, tags

Slide 4: Motives • For Future Retrieval – Personal filing system – Keywords to describe one bookmark out of 500 • For Public Findability – Blog Posts – Photographs – Videos

Slide 5: Basic Tagging • Web 2.0 • Participatory Web • Read/Write Web • One of the most basic ways that Web users can contribute to their own online experience • DIY cataloging

Slide 6: Tagging Websites • Social Media Websites – Flickr, YouTube • Social Bookmarking Websites – del.icio.us, CiteULike • Listmakers and Social Cataloging Websites – 43 Things, LibraryThing • Blogs – 75 million blogs – Nearly all blogging software supports tagging

Slide 7: del.icio.us

Slide 9: flickr

Slide 10: 43 Things

Slide 12: blogs

Slide 13: Tag Cloud

Slide 14: My Tag Cloud

Slide 15: + = My Tags Everyone Else’s Tags A Folksonomy

Slide 17: How popular is tagging? • 28% of online Americans have tagged content such as photos, news stories, or blog posts on the Web. (Pew Internet & American Life). • As of Feb 2007, 35% of all blog posts or 230 million were tagged according to Technorati. • LibraryThing has over 384,000 users who have created 32 million tags. • Flickr users have created over 10 million tags.

Slide 18: Mainstream Tagging • Major Media Websites – New York Times • Tag Cloud

Slide 20: Mainstream Tagging • Major Media Websites – New York Times • Tag Clouds – Parenting Magazine • Tag Clouds

Slide 22: Mainstream Tagging • Major Media Websites – New York Times • Tag Clouds – Parenting Magazine • Tag Clouds – New York Observer • Tag Clouds • Head Cloud

Slide 25: User-Tagging & Major Media

Slide 26: User-Tagging & Major Media

Slide 27: Amazon User-Tagging

Slide 28: Amazon User-Tagging

Slide 29: Gmail “Labels”

Slide 30: Facebook Tagging

Slide 31: RSS Feeds for Tags

Slide 32: RSS Feeds for Tags

Slide 33: Tag Searches

Slide 34: Tag Searches

Slide 35: Tagging Tools

Slide 36: Tagging Tools

Slide 37: Enterprise Tagging • Behind the Firewall • Intranet Bookmarking • Dogear – IBM social bookmarking community – 6,000 employees – Over 100,000 bookmarks

Slide 38: Dogear

Slide 41: Library Tagging

Slide 42: Danbury Public Library

Slide 43: Ann Arbor District Library

Slide 44: Ann Arbor District Library

Slide 45: Vanderbilt University Library

Slide 46: Carl A. Pescosolido Library

Slide 47: Tag Clouds on Library Websites

Slide 48: Subject Area Tagging

Slide 49: Subject Area Tagging

Slide 50: PennTags • Community for students, faculty, and staff of Upenn. • Bookmarks may include any Web content, OPAC records, items from SFX menu, items from video catalog, e-resources. • Users can make their bookmarks private or public. • Over 800 users, 13,000 bookmarks

Slide 51: PennTags

Slide 52: MTagger

Slide 53: LibMarks

Slide 54: Tags for Subject Guides

Slide 55: Tags for Subject Guides

Slide 56: ALA2007

Slide 57: ALA2007

Slide 58: ALA2007

Slide 59: Class Tags

Slide 60: Class Tags

Slide 61: Advantages?

Slide 62: Complementary Navigation

Slide 63: Inclusiveness Lift Elevator

Slide 64: Inclusiveness Newsagent News Stand News Newspapers

Slide 65: Currency • Instantaneous Results • Changes and/or additions to the taxonomy are added to the whole as quickly as they are made by the individuals.

Slide 66: Discovery Potential

Slide 67: Insight into User Behavior

Slide 68: Community • The social nature of tagging engenders a sense of community. • People have a common goal of cataloging their own information, but also sharing it with others. • Offers a chance to view what people have tagged with a word, also how others categorized a particular resource. • Involves the user and gets them invested in a website or brand.

Slide 69: Low Cost • Low/No Cost alternative to a traditional taxonomy for cataloging Web-based resources. • Massive rate of publication online between mediums such as blogs, wikis, etc. make a controlled vocabulary impossible. • Library of Congress collection consists of 130 million items. • The blogosphere alone produces more than 1.3 million items in the form of new blog posts every day. • Flickr has a million photos uploaded every day.

Slide 70: Usability

Slide 73: Limitations?

Slide 74: Lack of Synonym Control

Slide 75: Lack of Hierarchy • Folksonomies are flat, there are no parent- child relationships, no sub-categories. • Makes for a less robust classification system than the traditional taxonomy. • This limits the ability to add context to tags.

Slide 76: Lack of Precision • Discovery Systems • Folksonomies don’t have any hierarchical relationships, making searches less precise.

Slide 77: Lack of Recall • Recall: the ability of a system to return all resources related to a topic. • Because of lack of synonym control, a search of a folksonomy will not effect a complete results list because of the use of similar tags. • A search for cat will usually not retrieve resources which have been tagged with kitten, feline, or tabby.

Slide 78: Susceptible to Spam • Because these systems are open, spammers and/or unethical users out to corrupt a system could propagate bad tags.

Slide 79: The Future of Tagging Tag Clusters Tag Bundles Faceted Tags

Slide 80: Tag Clusters & Synonym Control

Slide 81: Tag Bundles & Personal Hierarchy

Slide 82: Faceted Tagging & Hierarchy

Slide 83: Next Gen Tagging • Geographic Metadata • Mobile Metadata which enables interaction with the world around us • 2 D Barcode Tags

Slide 84: Flickr’s GeoTagging

Slide 85: Socialight’s Mobile Metadata

Slide 86: Semapedia

Slide 88: http://winksite.com http://semacode.com

Slide 89: Ellyssa Kroski ellyssakroski@yahoo.com Blogs: http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian http://infotangle.blogsome.com http://www.slideshare.net/ellyssa

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