This research investigates the information behaviour of cult media fan communities on the internet, using three novel methods which have not previously been applied to this domain. Firstly, a review, analysis and synthesis of the literature related to fan information behaviour, both within the disciplines of LIS and fan studies, revealed unique aspects of fan information behaviour, particularly in regards to produsage, copyright, and creativity. The findings from this literature analysis were subsequently investigated further using the Delphi method and tag analysis. A new Delphi variant – the Serious Leisure Delphi – was developed through this research. The Delphi study found that participants expressed the greatest levels of consensus on statements on fan behaviour that were related to information behaviour and information-related issues. Tag analysis was used in a novel way, as a tool to examine information behaviour. This found that fans have developed a highly granular classification system for fanworks, and that on one particular repository a ‘curated folksonomy’ was being used with great success. Fans also use tags for a variety of reasons, including communicating with one another, and writing meta-commentary on their posts. The research found that fans have unique information behaviours related to classification, copyright, entrepreneurship, produsage, mentorship and publishing. In the words of Delphi participants – “being in fandom means being in a knowledge space,” and “fandom is a huge information hub just by existing”. From these findings a model of fan information behaviour has been developed, which could be further tested in future research.

Serious Leisure In The Digital World: Exploring The Information Behaviour Of Fan Communities

Social Book Search is an Information Retrieval (IR) approach that studies the impact of the Social Web on book retrieval. To understand this impact, it is necessary to develop a stronger classical baseline run by considering the contribution of query formulation, document representation, and retrieval model. Such a stronger baseline run can be re-ranked using metadata features from the Social Web to see if it improves the relevance of book search results over the classical IR approaches. However, existing studies neither considered collectively the contribution of the three mentioned factors in the baseline retrieval nor devised a re-ranking formula to exploit the collective impact of the metadata features in re-ranking. To fill these gaps in the literature, this research work first performs baseline retrieval by considering all three factors. For query formulation, it uses topic sets obtained from the discussion threads of LibraryThing. For book representation in indexing, it uses metadata from social websites including Amazon and LibraryThing. For the role of the retrieval model, it experiments with traditional, probabilistic, and fielded models. Second, it devises a re-ranking solution that exploits ratings, tags, reviews, and votes in reordering the baseline search results. Our best-performing retrieval methods outperform existing approaches on several topic sets and relevance judgments. The findings suggest that using all topic fields formulates the best search queries. The user-generated content gives better book representation if made part of the search index. Re-ranking the classical/baseline results improves relevance. The findings have implications for information science, IR, and Interactive IR.

http://prr.hec.gov.pk/jspui/bitstream/123456789/12098/1/Irfan%20Ullah%20CS%202020%20uni%20of%20peshwar%20prr.pdf

Improving social book search using structure semantics, bibliographic descriptions and social metadata

The purpose of this paper is to update Carlsson (2015), which examined the research on public libraries and the social web published from 2006 to 2012, and it also intends to go beyond Carlsson (2015) by including six additional variables.,Literature searches were performed against Web of Science Core Collection and EBSCOhost databases. By adapting Carlsson’s (2015) three level key phrase searches, which were then complemented by chain searching, a total of 60 articles were identified and analyzed.,In comparison to Carlsson (2015), this study shows that the recent research, published between 2012 and 2018, leans toward a more general acceptance of the social web’s usage to improve the services provided by public libraries; that the public library is rarely premised to be in a state of crisis; and that the social web is mostly perceived as having a complementary relationship with librarianship and library services. The findings from analyzing the six additional variables are also presented.,The findings from this study provide LIS professionals a greater understanding of where the research stands on the topic at present, and this study also identifies gaps in the literature to offer insight into the areas where future research can be directed.,Given the continued popularity of social web usage among public libraries, this study examines the literature published on the social web in the public library context between 2012 and 2018 and offers implications and future research suggestions.

Public libraries and the social web: a review and analysis of the existing literature

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of enriching the library subject headings with folksonomy for enhancing the visibility and usability of the library subject headings.,The WorldCat-million data set and SocialBM0311 are preprocessing and over 210,000 library catalog records and 124,482 non-repeating tags were adopted to construct the matrix to observe the semantic relation between library subject headings and folksonomy. The proposed system is compared with the state-of-the-art methods and the parameters are fixed to obtain effective performance.,The results demonstrate that by integrating different semantic relations from library subject headings and folksonomy, the system’s performance can be improved compared to the benchmark methods. The evaluation results also show that the folksonomy can enrich library subject headings through the semantic relationship.,The proposed method simultaneous weighted matrix factorization can integrate the semantic relation from the library subject headings and folksonomy into one semantic space. The observation of the semantic relation between library subject headings and social tags from folksonomy can help enriching the library subject headings and improving the visibility of the library subject headings.

Enriching the library subject headings with folksonomy

abstract:Based on a comparison of two nearly identical surveys in 2010 and 2016, this study examines the deepening practitioner concern over the use of social tagging within digital collections during the past six years. While participants reported a greater level of experience and increased use of social tagging, concerns regarding control, consistency, and potential abuse strengthened over the six years of the study. The authors discuss several potential causes for this increase and suggest future directions for social tagging.

Proceed with Caution: Deepening Practitioner Concerns about Social Tagging within Digital Collections

Purpose – While examining subject headings and tags is a popular research topic, most studies focus on comparing user-assigned tags and professional subject heading. Studies that compare Library of Congress Subject Headings to user-assigned tags, for instance, dominate the literature. However, little research has involved an examination on how and to what extent these features are actually used by library staff. This study adds to the body of knowledge. This study aims to focus on how librarians perceive and use tags. By focusing on people’s perceptions rather than simply comparing social tags and formal subject headings, new insights can be collected. Design/methodology/approach – This research collects data through semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 library staff from various roles and locations throughout Auckland Libraries. Findings – The research findings show that while social tags have been adopted and used in their work by the majority of library staff interviewed, there remains resistan...

Lucy Clements

Papers

Talking about tags: An exploratory study of librarians’ perception and use of social tagging in a public library