I am a student at the Free University of Brussels, where I'm currently following a master after master in Business Information and Service Management. In order to obtain this degree I have to write a master thesis. Since I already have a degree in archival science, I wanted to do something that builds on my knowledge in this area. My subject is folksonomies. I would like to find out if a folksonomy could have an added value for the databases of libraries and archives. I'm wondering if information specialists (like librarians) tag their books differently from other people, and if so, could this be relevant to searches in libraries and archives. LibraryThing is in fact an online library, where librarians tag their own books. In order to do some quantative analysis I am in need of a dataset. I would like to include authors, information specialists, and non-information specialists in this set. Unfortunately I am not an IT specialist/ programmer. For me it would be very difficult to program some sort of a webcrawler in order to extract data, which means that I will have to do it manually. I would like to analyze 200 books, with for each book the tags by the author, one "regular" person and one professional. I'm assuming that members of this group are information specialists (pros). My question now is this. Could you tell me which book you have in your library that belongs to an Author who LT?

How soon do you need it? It's an hour's work for me to give you an interface for it, and hours are scarce.

Did a quick scan of my library. I have two books (that I can tell quickly) that are written by LT authors: The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh and Word Myths by David Wilton.

I did my final cataloging paper on folksonomies, so this is a fairly interesting topic for me. How are you planning to analyse the tags? Just based on the number of tags applied, depth-cataloging, similarity to LCSH, ratio of personal tags to subject tags? I'd also be facinated by what you find.

RE: timspalding
The deadline for my thesis is the 15th May. So, I would like to have it as soon as you can find the time to give me a hand. But, since I'm the asking party I will be grateful if you can find the time at all. To answer your question differently: for whenever you deem fit.

Message edited by its author, Mar 12, 2008, 11:07am.

RE: kaelirenee
I will be analyzing the number, ratio and co-occurence of tags. I have thought of considering similarities with existing taxonomies (like LCSH or INSPEC), but unfortunately I don't have access to them. I'm studying in Belgium, so my university (VUB) doesn't use these systems since it is in English.

As far as I can tell, I only own books by one LT author, Sharon Lee. I own 11 of her books (I have 12 cataloged, one as wishlist).

Coming late to the party - I have one LT author's books - Naomi Novik.

I'm an archivist/records manager rather than a librarian, and I'm not sure whether I DO tag my books much differently from anyone else...

I don't want to provoke anyone with this, but the question shouldn't be "do librarians tag differently" but "do they tag differently in a way that reflects their professional side."

I mean, by definition* a librarian is over 22 or so and has a master's degree. This alone will cause some differences. You'd get a demographic difference if you only surveyed dog-catchers. The question isn't "do dog-catchers tag differently" but are they tagging books about westies with "nips, hold by scruff of neck."

*Accepting Librarian = MLS here; I won't fight this here anyway.

For example, if you discover that librarians make fewer spelling mistakes--which is likely--have you found anything significant? More than the average LT user? More than other adults with graduate degrees?

I have Mudbound by Hilary Jordan.

I'd speculate that librarians might tag more (more tags per book) for more access points (less generalities) and include location tags, because finding something is a professional need.

I bet the opposite is true—librarians don't put personal stuff into tagging, but only subject fields.

I *know* librarians use the tag "cookery," which is what LCSH calls it.

> 11

Are you kidding? We are reveling in the chance to label them "cookbooks", like any sane person would. The fact that inertia keeps "cookery" in the catalog does not mean we like using it.

Hm, I think I used "cookbooks" instead of "cookery" and I'm a librarian who has been a cataloguer most of my career. And catalogued a lot of cookbooks at work, too. Also, yes, I used a little personal stuff (my kids' names to indicate ownership, for one thing). And I probably use fewer tags than the average.

Weirdos in every group, though :)

I'm a librarian and cataloguer and I'm still frustrated that my tag taxonomy gives me longer tags than the fields allow! Oh well...

> 12

Oh, I added a cookbook yesterday (and tagged it "cookbook", thank you very much) but "cookery" is very much a big tag on it: how to eat

Fewer spelling mistakes! Hah! Apparently, you haven't read my posts. :) And I use LOTS of personal tags-that's one of the benefits of a tagging system, IMO-I have tags like @West and IPL. It improves MY findability. I know if I have a book I want to read whether I have to go to my public library or the 3rd floor of my library to get to it. When I did my paper on folksonomies in school, I used the tag cloud here as an example, comparing mine to the entire sites-while personal tags still appear on the long tail, they don't show up in the group cloud, with the exception of ones that are general, like "Read", "TBR", and "Owned." And the fact that users can combine was another big plus, one of the things I tried to emphasize needed to be included if used in a library catalog.

I'm veering off topic...

I'd be interested to know if different kinds of librarians tag differently-catalogers vs. reference, children's vs. academic, etc. But it's true-you can't really compare librarians to average users. You'd have to compare them to a parallel population-older, degree-holders, length of time they've had their LT account, etc.

@timspalding: Heh. I seem to tag with "cookery", and I've never used that cataloguing system. (I thought I might have "cookery books" but I'd never call them "cookbooks".)

I suspect that's British English, which is another variable: unless we've said in our profiles, there's no way to check where English-speaking individuals are from, and how that affects the tagging process. You _could_ see where the majority of their collection had been published, but that strikes me as unreliable. (I'm assuming, of course, that Wartaalman is concentrating on libraries tagged in English, which is another unsafe assumption.)

I'm pretty certain that my tags will all be spelt correctly, but I do have personal ones - indicating which books belong to my husband, for example. Or my favourites. Or ones I think are really long. None of these are highly professional, but they're useful to me. Probably my oddest tags are "geekery", "magids", "piffle" and "alas"!

I have a tag of "special - wierd" which is for, just, odd books - the Taschen 1000 extraordinary objects etc. That might be showing as just wierd, as I'm re-doing my tags at the moment...

Cookery is a LCSH-very NOT British. :) But, as with many LCSHs, it's an old term based on a format that's over 100 years old. Another benefit of tags and folksonomies-it can overcome the changes in usage and technology so much faster than the LC every could. Plus, subject specialists get to figure out their own tags. I think the example I used in my paper was some kind of manga that will probably never get its own subject heading.

I think my oddest tag is actually an odd application of a normal tag-I tagged The Shining with "divorce"-I read it when I was starting to go through a divorce and so that aspect of the book was really prominent to me, so that's one of the subjects it got. If I was dealing with alcoholism, it would have gotten that tag.

kaelirenee: good thing you didn't have to label it "axe murderer" ;-)

LOL-no, that would have been a little too close to the intro to cataloging project, when I cataloged my collection of forensics textbooks. ;)

Thanks for all the comments. It has given me some things to think about. I am indeed focusing mainly on English tags since my thesis is in English. Up until now I haven't found any significant differences between the overall tagging behavior of librarians and non librarians. This seems to indicate that librarians (or information specialists in general) are regular people too! ;-)

I disagree - I think librarians are more likely to fall into attempting to provide access to information (as that is what we are conditioned to do!) and therefore use more subject based informational tags which describe content and less tags which describe location of book, where you bought it, when you read it etc. Although I do use the tags borrowed and read 2008 a lot...
Perhaps the mindset is different on LT as the aim is to mainly organise your own collection, whereas at work it is always mainly to provide subject access using LCSHs. Hmm. I think the question hangs on whether librarians are able to separate their work cataloguing purpose with their home cataloguing purpose.