Controlled Vocabularies vs Social Tags: A Metadata Analysis of Book Catalogue in Mathematics

摘要

Purpose: Social tagging is now popular in organising information and retrieving then using metadata. It is believed that social tags may increase the use of library collections. The present study is identify similarities and differences between the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and social tags. The study is also conducted to know whether social tags can be implemented in the library's database. Methodology: The comparison is made between social tags collected from social cataloguing site -LibraryThing and LCSH descriptors collected from Library of Congress online catalogue. For this study more than a hundred book titles in the domain of mathematics were collected from two selected databases. Findings: Large portion (96.56%) of the social tags are not available in LCSH as but in contrast, about 30% of the LCSH descriptors are likely to be accepted by users as social tags. Spearman's correlation suggests that there are 85% chances that tags and descriptors can be used in overlapping terms. Jaccard similarity coefficient shows that users and experts use variant terminology to define a book catalogue. Finally it has been reflected that if the social tags are more subject oriented, it could improve the subject access of books in libraries; but it cannot substitute the controlled vocabulary like LCSH. Value: This study shows the comparison between social tags and controlled vocabularies which are used in a book's bibliographic description. This will create space for further research or improvement towards controlled vocabularies and its construction.