ABSTRACT We introduce the notion of &quot;induced tagging&quot; in the context of learning communities that are supported by digital libraries. We also describe an environment aimed to foster discovery and recommendation of digital library resources based on induced tagging

Adriana Arzamendi-Pétriz

J Alfredo Sánchez

Omar Valdiviezo

CiteSeerX

Induced Tagging: Promoting Resource Discovery  
and Recommendation in Digital Libraries 
J. Alfredo Sánchez, Adriana Arzamendi-Pétriz, Omar Valdiviezo 
CIRIA/CENTIA/ICT 
Universidad de las Américas Puebla 
Santa Catarina Mártir, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico 
+52-222-229-2666 
{j.alfredo.sanchez, arzamendip, omar.valdiviezo}@gmail.com 
 
ABSTRACT 
We introduce the notion of “induced tagging” in the context of 
learning communities that are supported by digital libraries. We 
also describe an environment aimed to foster discovery and 
recommendation of digital library resources based on induced 
tagging.   
Categories and Subject Descriptors 
H.3.7 [Digital Libraries]: Dissemination, user issues. 
General Terms 
Management, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. 
Keywords 
Tagging, recommendation, knowledge discovery, collaboration. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Finding relevant resources in vast digital libraries to support 
specific knowledge tasks remains a challenge both for users and 
access facilitators. Approaches to address this challenge include 
novel information retrieval algorithms and heuristics, 
visualization techniques, and automatic resource classification. 
So-called folksonomies take advantage of collaborative tagging 
that spontaneously generates, after some period of activity, 
categories for highly varied contents. 
The enormous success of tag-oriented websites such as 
delicious.com and flickr.com, as well as a number of studies show 
promising results regarding the potential of collaborative tagging 
to assist users in finding connections among information 
resources. As traditional categorization schemes are challenged, 
barriers are also perceived that could prevent collaborative 
tagging from being used effectively in the context of more formal 
academic settings. In the realm of librarianship, for example, 
controlled vocabularies are preferred and precision and 
collocation have been cited as important drawbacks in 
folksonomies [3]. Others have noted that the lack of user 
incentives or social awareness will have a negative impact on the 
effectiveness of tagging systems [2, 4]. 
We posit that collaborative tagging opens new opportunities for 
information services that support academic communities. Digital 
libraries require new skills but also allow for new ways of 
applying existing expertise. In particular, we consider that 
knowledge about resources and user needs that has been 
developed by personnel who regularly serve in reference desks 
and online information services can be applied to the construction 
of meaningful, consistent resource categorizations and provide the 
basis for helpful content recommendation and discovery in digital 
libraries. Thus, we have designed REC, an environment involving 
human and technological components which is aimed to promote 
collaborative tagging of digital library resources and to take 
advantage of the resulting tags for producing recommendations. A 
salient feature of REC is its tagging scheme, which we term 
“induced tagging.” We explain this notion next. 
2. INDUCED TAGGING  
The context of our work is a university division named CIRIA 
(http://ciria.udlap.mx), which comprises three major areas: a 
department of innovation and information services (IIS), a unit in 
charge of a multi-disciplinary undergraduate program in 
knowledge technologies, and the university libraries. The staff of 
the IIS department includes information experts whose role has 
been to assist local and remote users in finding the most relevant 
resources, both physical and digital, to support their learning and 
research tasks.  
After several years of service, our staff has become 
knowledgeable and capable of locating and recommending 
resources from vast and dynamic collections in a timely manner. 
In the process of helping users, staff and users often discover 
resources that might be useful for supporting current or future 
tasks. We consider it should be just natural for our team to 
bookmark these resources and share their findings with their 
colleagues. Unfortunately, existing tools for social bookmarking 
are not particularly suited for a digital library setting, and policies 
have not been in place that require our personnel to participate in 
collaborative tagging. REC, our proposed environment, addresses 
these issues. 
Although tagging systems in general rely on spontaneous user 
participation, we decided that at least the service side of REC 
would include mandatory tagging from our information experts. 
We use the term induced tagging to refer to social bookmarking 
with two key characteristics: (1) a well-defined group of 
participants are knowledgeable on the available resources and the 
background of the user community; and (2) tagging is required as 
part of their regular responsibilities as a reference team.   
 
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for 
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are 
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that 
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy 
otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, 
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. 
JCDL’07, June 18–23, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Copyright 2007 ACM  978-1-59593-644-8/07/0006...$5.00. 
 
396
Induced tagging is especially well suited for stable learning 
communities such as those of universities or research centers that 
use digital libraries intensively and afford a regular staff that 
supports their information inquiries, such as reference desks and 
specialized librarians. With appropriate tools, tagging meshes 
smoothly with the information experts’ tasks as they explore 
resources at hand. Although all users are encouraged to tag, 
having a specialized group that uses the system continuously and 
applies labels consistently for extended time periods, addresses 
concerns on the advantages of controlled vocabularies as well as 
incentive issues. The latter aspect is also addressed if 
recommendations are generated for resources that are consistently 
tagged by multiple users and tags are weighed depending on 
whether they have been generated by an expert or the general 
public. 
3. RELATED WORK 
A survey of tagging systems and a discussion of their potential for 
knowledge organization and discovery is presented in [3]. Models 
and taxonomies of tagging systems are offered by [1] and [4]. [5] 
discusses work involving tag-based recommendations, though not 
in the context of digital libraries.  
4. INDUCED TAGGING IN PRACTICE 
REC is the Ajax-based platform we have developed to explore 
induced tagging in the context of CIRIA. The REC software 
provides a toolbar that can be added to a web browser so users 
may label resources in a non-disruptive manner while they 
navigate around a digital library. Additionally, users may manage 
tags and request recommendations using the main REC interface, 
illustrated in Figure 1 (an English interface is being produced at 
the time of this writing). The current version of REC is available 
for public evaluation at http://ict.udlap.mx:9090/reduc. 
In the figure, user “waldo” has requested recommendations on 
available resources about “OAI”. He also indicates that four-star 
resources are preferred, since users may rate resources easily 
using up to five stars at the time of tagging. A list of OAI papers 
is presented which previously have been rated by CIRIA staff or 
other users. The number of users who have used the same label 
for a given resource as well as related labels are displayed. 
Resources labeled by a particular user may also be selected. Other 
sections of the interface include helpful information as follows 
(details not shown for space reasons): “Common topics” displays 
other labels shared by the resources being recommended; “my 
documents” lists resources tagged by the user on the subject (OAI 
in this case); “my subjects” shows a list of all the tags that have 
been assigned by the user; and “Popular” shows the top resources 
in terms of global tagging frequency and rating. Both “common 
topics” and “my topics” are presented as clouds in which font size 
is proportional to the weight of each terms. Term weight is 
determined as a combination of global term frequency, resource 
rating, and user category (regular or expert). All sections of the 
interface are dynamically updated upon selection of any of its 
elements (e.g., specific users or tags). 
We have trained the staff of CIRIA to start labeling resources in 
our digital collections using REC and have started pilot testing 
with selected users. Six information experts and 20 regular users 
are formally participating in this stage, though the system is 
already open to the public for evaluation and feedback. 
 
Figure 1. Managing tags and recommendations in REC 
 
Initial observations confirm our premises regarding the potential 
of induced tagging, as our information professionals have been 
very enthusiastic about their role as recommenders and 
authoritative source for resource tagging, whereas end users have 
started to rely on REC for bookmarking and recommendations. 
We are in the process of collecting quantitative and qualitative 
data to further support our approach. Our long-term target user 
base is a learning community comprising around 8,000 students 
and some 450 faculty. 
5. CLOSING REMARKS 
We believe induced tagging has an important role to play in 
bringing together existing expertise, proven methodologies and 
social bookmarking in order to assist users in obtaining 
recommendations and discovering digital library resources. The 
work on REC shows promising results in that direction. 
REFERENCES 
[1] Golder, S., Huberman, B. A. The structure of collaborative 
tagging systems. HP Labs Tech. Report. 2005. (hplabs.com). 
[2] Lee, K. What goes around comes around: An analysis of 
delicious as a social space. Proc. CSCW’06. 2006. 191-194. 
[3] Macgregor, G., McCulloch, E. Collaborative tagging as a 
knowledge organisation and resource discovery tool. Library 
Review, 55, 5 (Feb.), 2006. 
[4] Marlow, C., Naaman, M., boyd, d., Davis, M. 2006. HT06, 
tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, to read. 
Proc. Hypertext 2006, ACM Press, NY, 2006, 31-39. 
[5] Stoilova, L., Holloway, T., Markines, B. GiveALink: Mining 
a semantic network of bookmarks for web search and 
recommendation. Proc. 3rd Intnl. Workshop on Link 
Discovery (LinkKDD '05, Chicago), 2005, 66-73. 
 
397


Induced tagging: promoting resource discovery and recommendation in digital libraries

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=9325DE71875C8C69D74D05A4A7491BAE?doi=10.1.1.1071.2169&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Induced tagging: promoting resource discovery and recommendation in digital libraries

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

CiteSeerX