LibraryThing for Libraries: How Tag Moderation and Size Limitations Affect Tag Clouds

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse differences between tags on LibraryThing’s web page and tag clouds in their “LibraryThing for Libraries” service, and assess if, and how, the LibraryThing tag moderation and limitations to the size of the tag cloud in the library catalogue affect the description of the information resource. An e-mail survey was conducted with personnel at LibraryThing, and the results were compared against tags for twenty different fiction books, collected from two different library catalogues with disparate tag cloud sizes, and LibraryThing’s web page. The data were analysed using a modified version of Golder and Huberman’s tag categories (2006). The results show that while LibraryThing claims to only remove the inherently personal tags, several other types of tags are found to have been discarded as well. Occasionally a certain type of tag is included in one book, and excluded in another. The comparison between the two tag cloud sizes suggests that the larger tag clouds provide a more pronounced picture regarding the contents of the book but at the cost of an increase in the number of tags with synonymous or redundant information.

Subject-based knowledge organisation: An OER for supporting (digital) humanities research

“…This implies the need to address more subjective aspects of literary fiction known as "appeal characteristics" (Saricks & Wyatt, 2019) such as pacing, characterization, storyline, frame/setting, tone, and language/style. Many libraries therefore import social tag clouds for works of fiction from LibraryThing (Johansson & Golub, 2019).…”

Empirical study of college students’ extracurricular reading preference by functional data analysis of the library book borrowing behavior

“…Data mining is the technique to establish a meaningful model for analyzing, studying and summarizing the latent rules that are originally hidden in the large amounts of complex data [18,19]. By using the intelligent computing methods, the theory of statistics and the database technology, data mining requires to make classification tags in advance, which are a set of categories with different characteristics [20]. Most researchers have begun to use statistical methods and some intelligent principles to predict students' behaviors in digital campus living, to make reasonable decisions to explore the internal connections of the data [21][22][23].…”