• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.203-230
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• 2010

This study analyzed the development and growth of folksonomy by examining tags associated with 40 bestsellers on LibraryThing.com in 6-month intervals. It was found that tag values do not decrease but grow in terms of quantity and quality. Accordingly, we examined the major significances of the tags and their potential utilization as an expression of subjects. Our findings were as follows. First, the motivations for tagging can be categorized into personal information for search purposes, self-fulfillment such as sense of achievement, display of emotion and sharing of one's experience with others, or an altruistic objective that emphasizes sociality with a desire that one's actions might provide social benefits. According to our analysis, 74.12% of tags had a social motivation. Second, the total number of tags and the frequency of usage increased with time. Third, the categories that showed a high increase in tag usage were dates of publication and reading, key words, main characters, and book reviews. Tags related to subjects had the highest ratio. Fourth, among Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), multiple genres, key words and main characters were assigned to books, and specific key words and other properties were added as time progressed. There was also a slight increase in the number of tags consistent with LCSH. Fifth, we found that key tags could serve as a compilation of terms that reflects the knowledge base of the corresponding era. Thus, folksonomy should be continuously monitored for its quantitative and qualitative development of the tags to make improvements on its formative disadvantages, and identify internal semantic significance, be actively utilized in conjunction with taxonomy as a flexible compilation of terms that incorporate the history of a specific era.