A Quantitative Analysis of Collaborative Tags: Evaluation for Information Retrieval — a Preliminary Study

Collaborative (or social tagging) options are being added to many database catalogs on the assumption that not only those who assign tags but also those who use the catalog find such tags beneficial. But no quantitative analyses of collaborative tags exist to support this assumption. Based on questionnaires mixing collaborative tag clouds from http://www.LibraryThing.com and controlled Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) strings from the Library of Congress catalog http://catalog.loc.gov, it was found that controlled vocabulary terms are selected above collaborative terms; that the string format is preferred to the cloud; that strings appear to “perform” better in terms of reflecting book content; and that it is important to users that recall is high (where uncontrolled vocabulary retrieval is generally low). Results were found to be dependent upon particulars of tag cloud or string. The outcome indicates that catalog users would derive fewer information retrieval benefits from the current form of collaborative clouds than from the staid strings of the Library of Congress Subject Headings.