Study of tagging of images in Flickr--tags were less useful than image titles and descriptions

mentions Penntags, but attributes to Penn State

Videos now available:

May 22-23, 2009
Milwaukee Central Library, Centennial Hall
Milwaukee, WI

Information organization (IO), like other major functions of the information profession, faces many ethical challenges. In the IO literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, for example, the role of national and international IO standards, providing subject access to information, deprofessionalization and outsourcing of IO, education of IO professionals, and the effects of globalization. These issues, and others like them, have serious implications for quality and equity in information access. The Center for Information Policy Research and the Information Organization Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee join in presenting this conference to address the ethics of information organization.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Clare Beghtol, Professor
University of Toronto, Canada

José Augusto Chaves Guimarães, Professor
Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil

Janet Swan Hill, Professor, Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, USA

Abstract
Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information "survival" - remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.

"RLG Partners participating in discussions about renovating descriptive practices have identified network-level integrating and sharing of metadata contributions as an area that would benefit from collective action. These contributions could come from curators, subject librarians, experts, users, etc., both locally and globally, that can enrich the descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives and museums. To be truly effective, we need to share and aggregate contributions added by users in many diverse environments."

Vanderbilt University's Primo OPAC, called DiscoverLibrary.  Allows users to tag directly in the OPAC and search on tags from the main search box.

A blogpost from LibraryCrunch listing great additions to the library catalog of the future.

"This paper examines the use of non subject related tags in social bookmarking tools. Previous studies of tagging determined that many common tags are not directly subject related but are in fact affective tags dwelling on a user's emotional response to a document or are time and task related tags related to a users current projects or activities. These tags have been analysed to examine their role in the tagging process."

Screencast (slides & audio) of an entertaining presentation about tagging in LibraryThing given by Tim Spalding at the
Association of Christian Librarians.

[side note: He claims that there are more things tagged daily in LT than the total number of PennTags done in 2 years]

"The October/November 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology includes a special section on Folksonomies.

* Introduction: Folksonomies and Image Tagging: Seeing the Future? by Diane Neal, Guest Editor
* Why Are They Tagging, and Why Do We Want Them To? by P. Jason Morrison
* Trouble in Paradise: Conflict Management and Resolution in Social Classification Environments by Chris Landbeck
* Image Indexing: How Can I Find a Nice Pair of Italian Shoes? by Elaine Ménard
* Flickr Image Tagging: Patterns Made Visible by Joan Beaudoin"

Libraries using del.icio.us

The Library of Congress announces a partnership with flickr to collect metadata.

From the website:

Abstract:

This presentation by Dr. Ana Alice Baptista, head of Odisseia, will describe several projects including:

• CRiB (Conversion and Recommendation of Digital Object Formats), a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to assist cultural heritage institutions in the implementation of migration-based preservation interventions. The CRiB system works by assessing the quality of distinct conversion applications or services to produce recommendations of optimal migration strategies. The recommendations produced by the system take into account the specific preservation requirements of each client institution.
• Add-ons to DSpace
  • Commenting Add-On: a set of classes, servlets and custom tags that bring informal communication capabilities to the DSpace environment. The informal communication is assured by a threaded forum that can be attached to any DSpace resource: web-page, community, collection, submitted item or e-person.
  • Ontology Add-On: a feature that allows administrators to control the set of keywords used to describe submitted items. U Minho has ported to its system the publicly-available Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computing Classification System (CCS).
  • Recommendation Add-On: a set of custom tags that provide suggestions of resources (items, e-persons and comments) related to a given selected resource.
  • Web of Communication Add-On: the 3D Web of Communication allows the user to discover hidden relationships between items, comments and people. It works by displaying a VRML 3D web of resources involved in a communication process. The user is also able to jump to specific items on the environment thus providing a 3D navigational system over DSpace.
• Social tagging: Odisseia is involved in two social tagging-related projects: 1. to find out how information retrieval is affected by the use of social tags, 2. an international collaborative effort investigate which kinds of tags are being commonly used.

 

Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of becoming technological infrastructure to support knowledge management activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges, however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology generation, user and document recommendation. Design prototypes, evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.

User tagging of library resources: Toward a framework for system evaluation
JONATHAN FURNER (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

 Presented at IFLA 2007

GeoRSS

This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.

To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

Brief blog entry comparing tagging and controlled vocab.

"tagging has brought metadata to the masses"  

FEATURES
For that reason, the site features a blog, a wiki, RSS feeds and email alerts -- the last two being configurable down to individual tags. Users can rate sites and add them to a "favorites" page.

A much better than average report on the relationships between librarianship and the values of libraries and the values held by the media savvy, technology-centered students of today. Describes the two sets of values, and describes how libraries can adabt to the new expectation in meaningful ways.
 

pg 99 "It is clear that Millennials and others comfortable with a wide range of media and technologies will redefine the traditional manifestations of research and creative activity with these new mashed, cut and pasted creations. For them, the line between consumer and creator is blurred in a way that previously was not possible."

pg 100 "Clear rifts have emerged in the virtual terrain that is occupied by library policies, services and collections and is explored by online users. These rifts or disconnects can be grouped into three classifications for redress. These include technology (infrastructure and integration), policy (copyright, IT policy, liability), and unexploited opportunities."

Argues for the usefulness of collaborative tagging, and highlights the known problems with free tagging. Points to some obvious, and some more controversial ways of limiting problems of inter-tagger inconsistency and meaningless distinctions.

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

Shows the practices of taggers and tags.

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.

Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.

That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].

from the infosthetics blog - "semantically ordered tag clouds that resemble self-organizing maps. the size of the text & the color brightness of the background represent the frequency of the different terms. this technique has been applied to visualize the keywords present in website favorites, or the tags used by different del.ico.us users for the same web pages."

 tags clouds developed by Moritz Stefaner

Really well, reviewed in TechCrunch, this is a new, open source social bookmarking tool. Apparently, it allows you to upload and bookmark all kinds of files.

Plum is similar to Kaboodle and Stylehive in that it is a social bookmarking site that allows users to add a lot of metadata about bookmarks (including images). Bookmarked items can tagged and be added to a public, private or shared “collection” (there are a number of defaul collections and more can be added).

One key way that Plum is different than other bookmarking site is that it allows users to bookmark items on their computer, not just on the web. A file that is open in certain desktop applications (things like photos, power point presentations, iTunes playlists, address book entries, email, etc) can be added to Plum by clicking a button on the Plummer, a small downloadable application for Windows or Mac. See the last screen shot below for a look at the Plummer.

Gee...projects and local resource tagging!  How are we to ever keep up? 

My favorite article. I wish I could force you to read this article. please...

"And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there’s no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they’re tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging."

Listible is a new way to get relevant resources quickly.

Techcrunch post about google bookmarks in IE Toolbar.

 "Google Bookmarks have no “social” or sharing feature. And while it is disappointing that bookmarks are not available yet for Firefox, I will say that the interface in IE is excellent. In addition to setting tags, users can access bookmarks directly from the toolbar via a drop down menu containing chosen tags."

Interesting discussion about making OPML dynamic like the RSS feeds that an OPML file aggregates.  This would allow the distribution model of OPML to be changed to a subscription model.  In TagIt, we've sort of got this without having to change the way feed readers work.  Since a bibliography is capable of creating an RSS feed, they already can be read by the feed readers dynamically -- that is, the readers can get new content as the bibliography is updated.  And since the bibliography topics themselves are simply posts, they can be consumed via RSS.  The only things I'd need to do in the code is

• update the timestamp on the bibliography topic whenever a component is added or edited
• give access to an rss feed of just the bibliography topics (by user or by TagIt instance) 

Helpful for suggesting 5 measures that can be used to weight the impact of a post:

• recursive - citerank
• use counts
• rating scores
• co-citation & hub-authority scores
• author self citations

While clearly aimed at journal article citation impact rankings, some of this could be useful to determine an impact factor for the tagging system.

In PennTags, I'd like to rate posts on their impact, and extend ratings to authors too. This could build into a matrix that supports 'tribal elders' in a community of learners. I would expect that faculty would be rated high in impact, since many students would copy or follow their posts. As their postings became more impactful, the faculty authors themselves would become more impactful too. But it is a democracy of postings, and students or staff could rise. Some, some kind of hubbing would need to be developed too.

Wow, all I can say is this is very complicated...

This is linked from inside Pluck, which I was using to see how it's working these days. 

Shadows is a social bookmarking service for discovering, sharing and managing information on the web. Shadows supercharges this information with a "Shadow Page" — a community blog for any web page that includes views, ratings, tags, and comments by you, your friends and the Shadows community.

A blogpost from LibraryCrunch listing great additions to the library catalog of the future.

An H2O playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest.  it is a simple yet powerful way to group and exchange useful links to information -- online and offline.

I saw a presentation at Educause about this and talked to these guys.  It is an open source project in java/tomcat.  Really very similar to TagIt, but it is presented in the context playlists.  Also, cool idea of 'influence' rather than subjective ratings like in TagIt...

Mike already tagged this one, but it's quite fascinating so I thought I'd tag it again. So, if this does what I think it does, we could export bookmarks from delicious --> tagit and vice versa. Which would be so cool.

You can look at what various people and groups of people are reading on the web here. You can get an account and add your own links, and create and join groups here too. If you get an account, or create a group, either one can be made private, so nobody but you (if a private account) or your fellow group members (if a private group) can see your links.