An examination of user tags in a digitized humanities online collection

Abstract The purpose of this study is to examine user tags that describe digitized archival collections for humanities domains. For the current study, we observed what attributes users describe for primary historical and classical resources as tags, and whether tags in digital scholarly collections go beyond content description. Findings of the study show that topic‐related tags were more than half of tags while tags representing opinion, usage context, or self‐reference were few. Terms related to genre or physical format of a resource were found to be frequently used in describing primary archival resources. The findings help understand users' tagging behavior and resource interpretation in primary and historical resources in humanities.