When I finished library school in August, I put all of my papers in some boxes and haven’t looked at them since, because I really needed to recover. Happily, yesterday’s post about folksonomy finally forced me to dredge them out and bring to light a paper I did for my indexing and abstracting class on the use of a folksonomy alongside a controlled vocabulary in LibraryThing.

The first part is a sort of “literature review” on folksonomy (such as it is) and an overview of the concepts involved. The second part takes a look at LibraryThing and compares tags and subject headings.

The full text of the paper follows, or you can download a pdf for printing (warning: it’s in ugly, formatted-to-turn-in-for-class format; one of these days I’ll get it prettied up). Some discussion of the features of LibraryThing are slightly out of date (Tim & co. move fast!), and the statistics about popular tags and subject headings certainly are, but I think the main points are still relevant. I’d like to do some more in-depth analysis, especially of the statistical data, at some point in the future.

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