Traditional metadata helped people find data, but metadata also helps us understand and evaluate what we find. Social metadata enlists engaged communities in these tasks. This session presented some examples of various types of social metadata sites that the RLG Partner Social Metadata Working Group has been reviewing and some initial observations from the 67 reviews of 32 social metadata sites done so far. The discussion focused on why people contribute, why we have such a professional interest in tagging, and a "wish list" of user contributions that would most enrich the resources offered by libraries, archives and museums. Presented 1 June 2009 at the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting by Karen Smith-Yoshimura

1. Social Metadata
Karen Smith-Yoshimura
2009 RLG Partnership Annual
Meeting
Boston, MA
June 1-2, 2009

2. Metadata…
… helps us find data.
… helps us understand the data we
find.
… helps us evaluate what we should
spend our time evaluating.
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3. Examples of “social metadata”
Photographer: James Ring; Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand
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5. Examples of “social metadata”
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7. “The collections represented here have
been chosen and curated by tribal consultants
working in collaboration with University and
Museum staff.”

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11. Wikipedia article ranked #1 of 31,000,000
results in Google search of “gdansk”
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13. “A vote to end…edit wars”
The closest vote
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16. RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group
21 RLG Partner staff from four countries
• Drew Bourn, Stanford • John Lowery, British Library
• Douglas Campbell, National • Mark Matienzo, NYPL
Library of New Zealand • Marja Musson, International
• Kevin Clair, Penn State Institute of Social History
• Chris Cronin, U. Chicago • Henry Raine, New-York
• Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, U. Historical Society
Minnesota • Cyndi Shein, Getty
• Mary Elings, UC Berkeley • Ken Varnum, U. Michigan
• Steve Galbraith, Folger • Melanie Wacker, Columbia
• Rebekah Irwin, Yale • Kayla Willey, Brigham Young
• Lesley Kadish, Minnesota • Beth Yakel, U. Michigan,
Historical Society School of Information
• Helice Koffler, U. Washington
• Daniel Lovins, Yale Staffed by John MacColl, Karen
Smith-Yoshimura
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17. Social Metadata Working Group
Focus:
• User contributions that can enrich the
descriptive metadata created by
libraries, archives, and museums.
• Issues that need to be resolved to
communicate and share user
contributions on the network level.
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18. 20 questions, 7 subgroups
• Assessment: Objectives? Success metrics?
• Content:
— What user contributions would most enrich LAM
resources?
— What are exemplars of good social media sites?
• Policy:
— To what extent is moderation necessary?
— How do we encourage contributions?
— How do we gauge authenticity?
• Technical and vocabularies: How do we enable
users? Issues around vocabularies/folksonomies?
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20. Social Metadata Site Reviews
67 reviews of 32 sites, sites characterized
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21. Some observations
• Great variety of sites – many new
• Success tied to objective and audience, not
necessarily traffic
• Value in leveraging “sense of community”
• Some sites heavily moderated, others not at
all
• Strict credentialing limits effectiveness
• Lots of features of little value if not used
and require more documentation, overhead
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22. Some observations – cont.
• Few sites use ranking, filtering mechanisms,
use patterns to guide visitors
• Institution-specific sites have fewer
contributions than aggregate sites
• Tags contributed on network-level of more
value
• Tagging is most useful when there is no
existing metadata (eg photos, videos, audio)
• Need “critical mass” and “sense of
community” (existing or created)
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23. Why contribute? (Prelim)
• Tie-in to community of fellow
enthusiasts
• Ongoing conversation from own lives
• Pragmatic
• Feeling of contributing to the “brand”
of the institution or community
• Enhance own reputation
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24. Some promising areas
• Sites like Flickr to identify “mystery
photos” and provide context
• CommentPress (from Future of the Book)
for translating, transcribing digitized
documents in different languages and
scripts
• Integration of user corrections (Flickr
commons, WOTR, YourArchive)
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25. Discussion
• Do you host a social media site?
• What social media sites do you often use
— or your researchers use?
• What motivates your creating (or not
creating) your own social media site?
• Do your experiences agree with or
conflict with our preliminary
observations?
• What else would you like the working
group to address?
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