The Comparative and Analytical Study of LibraryThing Tags with Library of Congress Subject Headings

The internet in its Web 2.0 version has given an opportunity among users to be participative and the chance to enhance the existing system, which makes it dynamic and collaborative.The activity of social tagging among researchers to organize the digital resources is an interesting study among information professionals. The one way of organizing the resources for future retrieval through these user-generated terms makes an interesting analysis by comparing them with professionally created controlled vocabularies. Here in this study, an attempt has been made to compare Library of Congress Subject Headings(LCSH) terms with Library Thing social tags. In this comparative analysis, the results show that social tags can be used to enhance the metadata for information retrieval. But still, the uncontrolled nature of social tags is a concern and creates uncertainty among researchers.