Folksonomies allow users to personally classify and tag online content using their own vocabulary, rather than relying on a controlled taxonomy. While this provides flexibility, it can also introduce inconsistencies. Researchers are exploring ontological approaches to mapping related tags to concepts to improve search and recommendations. Sites like Flickr, Tumblr, and LibraryThing employ folksonomies, allowing users to tag items to make them easier for others to find.

3. Sarah Hatoum
Kate Palm
Zinia Rahman
What is Crowdsourcing?
- Crowdsourcing is characterized by the voluntary participation of a crowd to describe, obtain,
share ideas and solutions (Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012).
- Cultural institutions use crowdsourcing for “knowledge discovery and management” (Kopeck,
2014).
References
Estellés-Arolas, E., González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science, 38(2): 189–200. doi:10.1177/0165551512437638
Holley, R. (March/April 2010). Crowdsourcing: How and why should libraries do it? DLIB Magazine. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/holley/03holley.html
Holley, R. (2012, Feb. 11). Crowdsourcing: More cool sites to give libraries, archives and museums inspiration. [Blog]. Retrieved from: http://rose-holley.blogspot.com/2012/02/crowdsourcing-more-cool-sites-to-give.html
Kopec, K. D. (2014). Is crowdsourcing a model for cultural institutions? The Case of Polish GLAM Projects. The Internet, Policy & Politics Conferences. Poland. Tisch
Oomen, J. & Aroyo, L. (2011). Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 138-149. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2103354.2103373
ner European University in Krakow.
Owens, T. (2013, April 3). The metadata games crowdsourcing toolset for libraries & archives: An interview with Mary Flanagan. [Blog]. Retrieved from: Blog LOC.gov
Classification
- Collect simple metadata via social tagging at scale to create folksonomies
- Add user-created content to collections
MetaData Games (metadatagames.org)
Professor Pattuelli
LIS 653-02, Fall 2014
Complementing Collection
- Call for additional objects/materials to enhance an exhibit or collection
- Gather citations to improve bibliography for an area of knowledge
Description
- Draw upon scholars and experts to assist in cataloging materials from special
collections
U.S. National Archives
GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) &
Crowdsourcing
- shares archived material
- builds a user-friendly collection
- allows greater access across different generations and cultures
- leverages cost-effective subject expertise of crowd
Museum of Broken Relationships
Transcription
- Invite users to edit and/or transcribe materials that have been digitized
Sample Projects
Classification: ✹ Metadata Games & Steve.museum (social tagging) ✹ Your Paintings
Tagger (subject tags for UK’s collection of oil paintings) ✹ Flickr Commons ✹ U.S. Nat’l
Archives (tag images & records)
Description: ✹ U. of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts Project (cataloging) ✹ Penn
Libraries’ Provenance Online Project (tag and comment on provenance images in Flickr
to improve knowledge of past owners)
Transcription: ✹ U.S. Nat’l Archives ✹ NYPL What’s On the Menu
Complementing Collection: ✹ Museum of Broken Relationships (add personal stories)
✹ Database of the Smokies (gather citations) ✹ U.S. Nat’l Archives P.O.P. (http://provenanceonlineproject.wordpress.com/about/)
GLAMs & Crowdsourcing

4. Cataloging music has many unique areas of
difficulty
- Multiple formats - Multiple titles
- Audio and print often come in
collections
- Usually searched by format/genre, not
subject
- Books about music vs. Music
manuscripts
Different solutions have been arrived at,
both at national and local levels
- The Dewey Decimal System does not
separate manuscripts from books, and classes
all materials between 780 and 789.
- Library of Congress Class-M includes:
● M 1-5000 for music scores
● ML 1-3910 for books on music
● MT 1-960 for education and instruction
- Alpha-Numeric System for Classification of
Sound Recordings (ANSCR) was devised for
audio items to be browsable.
Fall 2014
Dr. Pattuelli
LIS-653-02
Janelle Varin
Megan Beck
Caroline Evanson
Multimedia Cataloging:
Music, Film, and Web 2.0
Cataloging film has been historically difficult
- relative newness of material
- multiple versions problem
Beginning in the 1930s, organizations on the
national and local level worked towards
standardization of film cataloging, but no real
solutions found until the 1960s.
DDC and LCC do not have large sections dedicated
to film and related subjects
- Information is spread out and hidden within
other subjects
RDA and FRBR address multiple versions problem
Challenges in cataloging digital information from Web 2.0
- no standard model for assigning value to content
- more interest in creating than archiving data
- dated copyright laws result in limitations
“Keep everything, worry about it later”
- considering archival process from the beginning
by catalog entire process of a project
Library of Congress’s Twitter archival project
- acquire and preserve 2006-10 tweets
- 170 billion tweets cataloged as of January 2013
Classification tools for organizing and connecting
multimedia data
- metadata
- taxonomies and folksonomies
Cataloging multimedia items presents several challenges, especially in an evolving digital age. The challenges
and trends in cataloging these resources, in both traditional and electronic form, are presented below.
http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/cdclassicalmusicjpg
http://bitshare.cm/post/2082365481/the-film-industry-is-big-business-infograph
http://g3ict.org/resource_center/newsletter/news/p/id_500

5. Managing “Born Digital”
Karen Gaines, Bridget Gavlin, Cassie Hickman
Types of Born-Digital Materials
Defining “Born Digital”
“Born Digital”: Items originally
created and managed in digital form.
“Born Digital” is not:
● Analog material converted or
reformatted into digital format
Erway’s 4 Essential
Principles
1. Do no harm (to the physical media
or the content).
1. Don’t do anything that
unnecessarily precludes future
action and use.
1. Don’t let the first two principles be
obstacles to action.
1. Document what you do.
Further InformationTypes of Born-Digital Materials Example Cataloging
Methods
● Dublin Core
○ 15 optional elements, faceted
● PBCore
○ Used for video, audio, text, images
and interactive learning objects for
television, radio, and Web activities
● METS
○ Open standard, XML encoding
format used for digital text and
images
Images
Image source: multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu
LIS 653-03 Knowledge Organization
Professor Christina Pattuelli
Fall 2014
Managing “Born Digital”
Karen Gaines, Bridget Gavlin, Cassie Hickman
Types of Born-Digital Materials
Defining “Born Digital”
“Born Digital” is:
Items originally created and
managed in digital form.
“Born Digital” is not:
Analog material converted or
reformatted into digital format
Types of Born-Digital Materials
LIS 653-03 Knowledge Organization
Professor Christina Pattuelli
Fall 2014
Erway’s 4 Essential Principles of
Managing Born-Digital Content
1. Do no harm (to the physical media or the
content).
2. Don’t do anything that unnecessarily
precludes future action and use.
3. Don’t let the first two principles be obstacles to
action.
4. Document what you do.Image source: multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu
Cataloging Example
Catalog Example: Library of Congress

6. Folksonomies: The New Age Classification
What is a folksonomy?
According to Thomas Vander Wal, a folksonomy is
a user generated taxonomy. Folksonomies allow for
the personal classification of online content by the
user, the opportunity to share with other users, and
information retrieval. A folksonomy is uncontrolled;
users are able to apply tags using their vocabulary
based on their own meaning and understanding of the
content.
Pros and cons:
Folksonomies do not rely on a complicated
schedule to sort information, so finding the data
you need is as easy as looking up a specific
term. However, this also works against the
system, as all of the terms one can search for
are subjective to each individual user.
Thomas Vander Wal, 2005
Folksonomy Text Cloud
http://www.tumblr.com
http://www.librarything.com
A possible approach:
Movahedian and Khayyambashi, two computer
engineers, have developed an ontological approach
to improving recommendations based on
folksonomies and user ratings. Because the
language of folksonomies can vary greatly, these
scholars attempt to find underlying meanings of tags
and map them to onotological concepts. These
concepts are used to decipher the user’s likes and
dislikes, therefore, providing more reliable
recommendations.
Movahedian and Khayyambashi, 2014
Broad Vs. Narrow Folksonomies:
Broad folksonomies have many people tagging the same
object with numerous tags. Narrow folksonomies have one or
few people tagging the same object with a singular term; one
tag per term.
Brian Engel, Nanyamkah Mars, Chelsea Patella
How they’re used today:
Folksonomies are used on many websites, mainly
those of social media. Sites such as Flickr, Tumblr,
Twitter, and many others rely on users for the
classification of their posts. Tumblr describes the use
of tags as a way to “make it easier for readers to find
posts about a specific topic on [a] blog,” and to find
posts, the user can just “type things in and hit enter.”
References:
How to use tags. Retrieved from https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/using_tags
Movahedian, Hamed and Mohammad Reza Khayyambashi. “Folksonomy-based user
interest and disinterest profiling for improved reccomendations: An ontological
approach.” Journal of Information Science 40.5 (2014): 594-610. Print.
Schachter, Joshua How tags exploit the self-interest of individuals to organize the
Web for everyone 2006
http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?TRID=432&Cand=T&pg=1
A short introduction to LibraryThing. Retrieved from
http://www.librarything.com/quickstart.php
Vander Wal, T. (2005, February 21). Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow
Folksonomies. Retrieved from
http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1635
Vander Wal, T. (2007, February 2). Folksonomy Coinage and Definition.
Retrieved from http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html
LibraryThing is a website which allows users to
“catalog [their] books from Amazon, Library of
Congress, and 700 other world libraries.” This
website emphasizes the use of tagging and offers
features such as “word clouds” of tags and authors
in one’s library, “tag mirrors” where one can see what
others are tagging the same item, and a collection of
all LibraryThing tags.
http://www.Tumblr.com
653 Knowledge Organization
Dr. Cristina Patuelli
Fall 2014
Key Image 1