This paper will look closely at LibraryThing ( a website that could be considered a Web 2.0 version of a union catalog. Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are several currently prominent examples of websites that thrive on user-supplied content, but even a now venerable site like Amazon has always allowed its customers to post reviews and comments. 1 In addition to a reliance on keyword searching, today’s users increasingly use interactive websites that allow them to both upload their own data or content and to connect with other users of the site-the Web 2.0 phenomenon. A recent study, for example, found that students using the University of Oklahoma’s online public access catalog (OPAC) performed keyword searches fourteen times more often than subject searches. These expectations, however, do not match how information is contained, discovered, and presented in traditional library catalogs.
Delicious library vs librarything how to#
Today’s library users, who are increasingly comfortable with searching on the Internet, have certain expectations about how to search for information and how it will be displayed. The advent of interactive websites, part of what is known as the Web 2.0 or second-generation Web development and design, has called into question the ways in which libraries provide access to their collections. Because of these differences, user tags can enhance subject access to library materials, but they cannot entirely replace controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress subject headings. A comparison between the LibraryThing tags for a group of books and the library-supplied subject headings for the same books shows that users and catalogers approach these descriptors very differently. The website LibraryThing currently permits its members to add such user tags to its records for books and therefore provides a useful resource to contrast with library bibliographic records.
Some members of the library community, including the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, have suggested that libraries should open up their catalogs to allow users to add descriptive tags to the bibliographic data in catalog records. Rolla is Cataloging Librarian at University of Colorado at Boulder earlier version of the paper was presented at the Third Colorado Academic Library Summit, in Lakewood, Colorado, under the title “LibraryThing vs.
User Tags versus Subject Headings: Can User-Supplied Data Improve Subject Access to Library Collections?
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