Social Tags Versus Controlled Vocabularies: A Comparative Metadata Analysis

With the advent of technology, the tagging has gained popularity. Many researchers believe that social tags, #hashtag may increase the use of library collections. The present study examines the similarities and differences between the Library of Congress’s Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors and social tags. The study also sought to know whether social tags can be implemented in the library’s database or not. This paper focuses on the comparison between social tags collected from social cataloguing site Library Thing and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) descriptors collected from Library of Congress online catalogue. For this study more than a hundred book titles in the domain of philosophy were collected from the two selected databases. The results suggest that if the social tags are more subjects oriented, it could improve the subject access to books in libraries; but it cannot substitute the controlled vocabulary like Library of Congress Subject Headings.