This morning, I attended “Patrons Cataloging?  The Role and Quality of Patron Tagging in Item Description.”  The benefit of patron tagging is something that I’ve written a bit about in another blog for the metadata class I’m currently taking, and I was very, very interested to see what the librarians at BYU were sharing.

One of the things I continually find in the literature about tagging is a pronounced lack of quantitative research, while anecdotal and qualitative research abound.  I was quite pleased to find that the presenters were sharing a good amount of statistical reasearch that they had done matching LC subject headings and keywords with Library Thing’s tags.  (They used ISBNs as the crosswalk between MARC records and Library Things tags.)  It seemed like they done a very nice job of assessing the effectiveness of tags on findability.  For their results, just visit the ACRL repository (I plan on revisiting their presentation tonight.)

Another interesting moment in this presentation came when the presenters mentioned that a library could outright buy Library Thing’s tags to import into their tagging-friendly catalog (Primo, Aquabrowser, etc.).  I, for one, didn’t know that Library Thing offered this.  A representative of Library Thing named  Sonya stepped to the microphone and clarified that the set of tags sold by Library Thing are actually a vetted subset of tags.  Apparently, Library Thing takes the top 20 tags for each record and creates the subset that it offers to libraries so that they can instantly populate a new tag-friendly catalog with a critical mass of tags.  Basically, you get Library Thing’s cream of the crop.  Cool, cool, cool.

As with all good presentations, a lot of discussion happened afterwards.  I spoke to another librarian about what we saw as the future of patron tagging, and we agreed that it would be interesting to see how patron interfaces would be created in the next few years that best present both controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies….side by side.  Lots of food for thought.  If you’re interested at all in patron tagging or are familiar with the work at Penn. and their PennTags project, I would highly suggest taking a look at this very comprehensive study done by the William Lund and Allyson Washburn at BYU.