User Behavior in Tagging in the OPAC : The Example of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Library in Zagreb

Paradigmatic change has occurred in understanding the relationship of Internet users towards the content available on the Web.Unlike the earlier role of users as passive consumers, the new network, Web 2.0 is based on the user-friendly technologies which are focused on collaborative and interactive information services, social bookmarking services, where users can categorize and store their own web links, images, bibliographic records or PDF files.These technologies allow users to independently organize information in the ways which suit them best.Unlike the traditional organizing, where information specialists or authors describe, organize and classify contents, the users of social bookmarking services create metadata themselves using uncontrolled keywords -tags.Library of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb also allows its users to tag bibliographic records of library materials.In June 2010 the option of adding and browsing tags in the Koha catalogue was plugged in, and the users were informed about this new library service.The aim of this study is to explore how the Library users tag bibliographic records, i.e. what keywords are used to organize the information in the catalogue.The research problems were the following: which users are the most common taggers, which type of metadata is marked by tags and how do theme tags correspond to the key words in the catalogue?