Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery. Design/methodology/approach – A definition of controlled vocabularies is proposed and used to assess the efficacy of collaborative tagging. An exposition of the collaborative tagging model is provided and a review of the major contributions to the tagging literature is presented. Findings – There are numerous difficulties with collaborative tagging systems (e.g. low precision, lack of collocation, etc.) that originate from the absence of properties that characterise controlled vocabularies. However, such systems can not be dismissed. Librarians and information professionals have lessons to learn from the interactive and social aspects exemplified by collaborative tagging systems, as well as their success in engaging users with information management. The future coexistence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging is predicted, with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal and informal. Research limitations/implications – Librarians and information professional researchers should be taking a lead role in research aimed at assessing the efficacy of collaborative tagging in relation to information storage, organisation, and retrieval, and to influence the future development of collaborative tagging systems.

The field of subject analysis enjoyed a flurry of interest in the 1970s, and has recently become a focus of attention again. The scholarly community doing work in this area has become more diffuse, and has grown to include new groups, such as information architects. Changes in information services and information seeking have led to reexamination of the nature and role of subject analysis tools and practices. This selective review looks at thesauri, guided navigation, and folksonomy as three activity areas in which subject analysis researchers have been attempting to address rapidly changing new environments.

Increasing the amount and quality of metadata is essential for realizing the Semantic Web. The research reported on in this article addresses this topic by investigating how resource authors might best collaborate with metadata experts to expedite and improve metadata production. Resource authors, working as scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), were surveyed about collaborating with metadata experts (catalogers) during the metadata creation process. The majority of authors surveyed recognized cataloger expertise is important for organizing and indexing web resources and support the development of a collaborative metadata production operation. Authors discovered that, as creators of web resource intellectual content, they too have knowledge valuable for cataloging. This paper presents the study’s framework and results, and discusses the value of collaborative metadata generation for realizing the

There have been ample suggestions in the literature that terms added to documents from Flickr and Wikipedia can complement traditional methods of indexing and controlled vocabularies. At the same time, adding new metadata to existing metadata objects may not always add value to those objects. This research examines the potential added value of using user-contributed (“social”) terms from Flickr and the English Wikipedia in image indexing compared with using two expert-created controlled vocabularies— the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Our experiments confirmed that the social terms did provide added value relative to terms from the controlled vocabularies. The median rating for the usefulness of social terms was significantly higher than the baseline rating but was lower than the ratings for the terms from the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Furthermore, complementing the controlled vocabulary terms with social terms more than doubled the average coverage of participants’ terms for a photograph. The study also investigated the relationships between user demographics and users ’ perceptions of the value of terms, as well as the relationships between user demographics and indexing quality, as measured by the number of terms participants assigned to a photograph. It was found that the participants with more tagging and indexing experience assigned a greater number of tags than did the other participants.