User tagging of library resources: Towards a framework for system evaluation

Although user tagging of library resources shows substantial promise as a means of improving the quality of users’ access to those resources, several important questions about the level and nature of the warrant for basing retrieval tools on user tagging are yet to receive full consideration by library practitioners and researchers. Among these is the simple evaluative question: What, specifically, are the factors that determine whether or not user-tagging services will be successful? If success is to be defined in terms of the effectiveness with which systems perform the particular functions expected of them (rather than simply in terms of popularity), an understanding is needed both of the multifunctional nature of tagging tools, and of the complex nature of users’ mental models of that multifunctionality. In this paper, a conceptual framework is developed for the evaluation of systems that integrate user tagging with more traditional methods of library resource description. Tagging and user tagging Tagging is the process by which the resources in a collection are tagged—i.e., assigned tags in the form of words, phrases, codes, or other strings of characters—with the dual intention (i) that the tags individually or collectively represent features of the tagged resources (or of resource– tagger relationships), and (ii) that such representations or descriptions may be exploited by search services that enable people to discover the particular resources that are of interest to them at particular times. User tagging is tagging done by the “users” of search services—i.e., by those whose participation in the resource discovery or information retrieval process has historically been limited to the expression of information needs and construction of search queries, stopping well short of the