Research On The Integration Of Folksonomies And Library Catalogues

The success of tagging services like delicious Flickr and DouBan has shown that tagging is a great collaboration tool of information organization. It has provided users a new convenient tool of information organization. Folksonomy, as a result of tagging services, has corresponding attracted many libraries. They has become to research how to use this new pattern of information organization in the libraries. Folksonomies are being applied to books, in the University of Michigan Ann Arbor's library catalog (a project called SOPAC), and in Library Thing, a social site for cataloging personal libraries.Compared with the traditional controlled vocabulary, folksonomy, as a new tool of information organization, has many benefits:easy-to-use (people can use it without any indexing knowledge); wide and rich semantics; updated quickly; strong interaction between different users and so on. But as uncontrolled vocabularies, folksonomies suffer from many difficulties such as ambiguity in the meaning of and difference between terms, a proliferation of synonyms, varying levels of specificity, and lack of guidance on syntax and slight variations of spelling and phrasing. All these shortcomings has influenced the retrieval effectiveness. As the growing of tags, resources and users, it will become more serious. Traditional controlled vocabulary, which has a wide application in the information management field, has adopt a top-down organizational method and pre-determined terms, can solve the homonymy, synonyms polysemous and so on. Therefore, if we can create a system, which integrate the rich resources and user data of folksonomy and the normalization and hierarchies of controlled vocabularies, it will provide users a better search experience.The paper first introduced the works on the current situation of the integration of folksonomy and library catalogue, compared the functions of the systems which combine the folksonomy and library catalogue, and put forward some suggestions to the libraries to how to develop the folksonomies in the libraries. And then we compared the tags form the Chinese Web2.0site Douban website and the catalogues form the National Digital Library of China Access Catalogue. The area of the comparison include authors, titles, and subject terms and categories names. Next to the analyses, we put forward a project to how to integrate the folksonomy and library catalogue. In the end of the paper, we summarizes the major and future works.