Social taggning
En studie av en webb 2.0 tjänst i OPAC
The aim of this thesis is to study social tagging in an OPAC by looking at the tags of Ann Arbor District Library?s catalogue. In this thesis I analyse the possibilities of social tagging. The main questions to be answered are what is the distribution of tags in different categories, what are the differences between fiction and non-fiction and how do the social tags differ from the terms of the professional indexing practice. Studying 500 tags I find that subject matter was the most frequent category for tags assigned to fiction and non-fiction. The tags assigned to fiction were more multi-dimensional than the tags assigned to non-fiction. The tag categories experience and task, which are unique to the social tagging practice, were not used frequently. I suggested that they still had potential to be of interest to users with common interest and taste. The study shows that the users did not, to any higher extent, use the terms of the catalogue. The tags were in general less specific than the professional terms. In the thesis I use communication theory to analyse the social tagging practice and two different terminologies. I find that the social tagging practice has the potential of being a complement to the professional indexing, allowing users to use more associations and their own terms. I find that the manga and anime community used their own terms that in many ways were different from the professional terms.