Implications of Social Tagging for Digital Libraries

This study aims to answer whether social tagging through user collaboration could be utilized for the creation of digital knowledge of the web, and whether we could verify the quality and efficacy of social tagging to obtain benefits from it. In particular, this paper examines the inter-indexer consistency of social tagging in comparison to professional indexing. It employs two different similarity measures, both of which are based on the Vector Space Model to deal with numerous indexers. It contributes to the utilization of social tagging in the organization of the web, and encourages to adopt social knowledge in developing suitable vocabularies for resources newly generated in the digital library environment. Furthermore, the comparative analysis with two different measures produced more credible results by illustrating a similar pattern of indexing tendency in both measures.