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Dissertation Information for Margaret E.I. Kipp

NAME:
- Margaret E.I. Kipp

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- University of Western Ontario (Canada) (2009)

ADVISORS:
- Grant Campbell

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Liwen Vaughan
- Victoria L. Rubin

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Information organisation practices on the Web: Tagging and the social organisation of information

Abstract: This thesis examines the phenomenon of social tagging from its early beginnings to its current level of prominence on a wide variety of websites in a series of linked studies examining the structures and patterns of tag term use to determine whether regular patterns appear that would support information organisation and retrieval.

The first study was designed to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Statistical analysis of tagging patterns shows that many tagging practices are significantly similar or at least complementary to existing subject organisation systems. The tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to personal information management which suggest an extra contextual dimension to information organisation which conventional systems do not generally facilitate.

The second study examined the context of online indexing from the viewpoint of the three different groups involved in information organisation: users, authors, and intermediaries. The results show that there are important differences in the context of keywords from the three groups.

The third study compared participant search behaviour using a social bookmarking tool and a more traditional journal database in order to determine if users found tags useful in their search process. The study showed that users did indeed make use of tags in their search process. Users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database to locate useful search terms and links to related articles supplied by the database. Librarians did not previously think users would be willing to classify things and in general people thought user classifications would be too divergent or too personal to be useful; however, this study has shown that while user indexed systems have all of the flaws one might expect of such systems they also provide an intriguing exploration of user indexing and a strong support for indexing structures of all kinds in the support of information retrieval.

MPACT Scores for Margaret E.I. Kipp

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-09-28 01:14:23

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