Social tagging allows users to collaboratively organize information on the web by applying descriptive tags or keywords to websites, photos, videos, and other resources. Tags are one-word descriptors that make searching and organizing bookmarks easier. While the concept of social bookmarking began in 1996, tagging emerged as an important element in 2003 with the launch of Delicious, which allowed users to tag and share bookmarks. Tagging is now used across various media and has many uses, including helping experts share resources with researchers and identifying popular or high-quality information. However, tags also have disadvantages like synonyms, misspellings, and ambiguity. Studies have found that social tagging allows better access to information and duplicates some controlled vocabularies, suggesting a hybrid

1. Social TaggingBy Aimee Bourland, Ellen Collins, Emily Jennings and Mollee March

2. What is Social Tagging?A collaborative way of organizing information on the web. Users identify key terms to describe a website (Delicious), a photo (Flickr), or a video (YouTube).

3. What is a tag?Tags are one word descriptors. Delicious, a popular social tagging site, defines tags as “A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark.”The purpose of tagging is to make searching easier as well as keeping your bookmarks organized and easy to access.

4. The History of TaggingThe history of social tagging is not very long. As the information available on the web grows, people need a way to organize and identify it.The history of social bookmarking began back in 1996 with the launch of itlist.com, a website that was the first to utilize the concept of shared bookmarks. It was followed up by some similar sites that all failed in the dot com crash in 2001.

5. History continuedIt wasn’t until the launch of Delicious in 2003 that tagging became an element of social bookmarking. Now users can describe the content that they are saving. It gets shared with others and helps facilitate searches.In addition, social tagging has been applied to photos, videos, web pages and academic paper citations, and “in each of one of these cases, an organically-evolved, shared vocabulary, emerged to describe the content of the tagged objects” (Chi & Mytkowicz, 2008).

6. UsesTagging has a variety of uses. Users can tag information that they find in order to organize them for their own retrieval or they can tag them for the benefit of others, so that they may find information more readily.For example, when someone who is an expert in a subject shares their tags on a topic, it can help someone researching that topic find articles and other resources that are good and recognized by the community. In some cases if can help users identify information that is the best of the best (Hammond, et al).Since tagging uses “natural language” it can be useful to people not aware of certain jargon or slang (Wichowski).

8. Uses, continuedTechnorati.com, even though it is only beta, is a good example of where tagging is going and how it can be useful to the information professional. Technorati uses tags to identify and organized user-created web content. As it becomes easier to create a blog or a webpage, people will need a way to have this information organized. In the future we could have a Technorati-like application of tags all over the web. The web is growing everyday and it is already too large to be feasibly cataloged unless it was done socially.

9. Evaluation: DisadvantagesPeople may use one tag as different meaning (ie: Apple for the fruit or the computer). People may use various synonyms for the same thing (ie: Apple, mac, macintosh for the computer). The vocabulary tends to be more basic than specific (ie: Jargon; programming instead of perl or even javascript). A final issue is “lexical anomalies” such as “singular vs. plural, spelling variants, verb tenses, differences in treatment of multiword tags and compound terms, differing punctuation conventions, and word order.”

10. Evaluation: AdvantagesSome advantages to searching tags are that it is easier for users to make fortuitous discoveries. Also, the tags are closer to colloquial language of users. Controlled vocabulary can, at times, be obscure. This could help alleviate confusion for people not familiar with the particular language of a certain profession or group.

11. Evaluation: EffectivenessA cognitive analysis of tagging was done by Sinha (2005) and social tagging was found to allow users better access to the information. Because the users were deciding how to categorize the information, it was easier for them to remember the created tags later when they went to retrieve the information.

12. Evaluation: Potential of TaggingThomas (2009) did a study that analyzed how well social tags duplicated the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The purpose of the study was to support the idea that the best thing for users is a hybrid of social tagging and controlled vocabulary headings. (ie: LCSH) Thomas retells Merholz’s (2004) analogy of this hybrid: letting the social tags enhance controlled vocabulary is like “letting people create paths through a landscape and then paving the paths” (415). As librarians, we don’t have to debate “either/or.” We can, in fact, have both, and both could be more beneficial for users. At the end of her study, Thomas(2009) asserted that, “…social tagging does indeed augment the LCSH providing additional access to resources. Tags do supply additional vocabulary that could be incorporated into LCSH. A hybrid catalog combining both LCSH and a folksonomy would result in richer metadata and be stronger than the sum of its parts, giving users the best of both worlds” (431).

13. ReferencesGROUP 5’s