Social Tagging: Any Good To Digital Libraries?

Abstract

Social tagging has established itself as a crucial aspect in today’s digital library. Social tagging has formed an interest in the research community because of how it has evolved the way people use digital library. The main aim of this paper is to quantify the concepts of social tagging and wheather it had an impact to the use of digital libraries. This will be done through three angles: (1) definition of social tagging, its applications in digital libraries and examples of libraries that use the tagging system. (2) The advantages that digital libraries accrue from social tagging system and (3) the demerits that digital libraries may have to encounter as they adopt this tagging system. For (1), I look at how the tagging system works and the list of libraries that have adopted this technology. For (2), I analyze the advantages digital libraries enjoy after adopting the system that other libraries are unaware of. Lastly, for (3), I look at the disadvantages that digital libraries may be forced to cope with as a result of installing this system in their operations. The results would be of utmost benefit to digital libraries to either adopt or do away with the social tagging system.