Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things?
A conference poster (General Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, BC, 6-11 November 2009) by Margaret Kipp
How do users find searching social bookmarking sites compared to searching more classically organised sites? Do users think that tags assigned by other users are more intuitive? Do tagging structures facilitate information retrieval? How does this compare to traditional structures of supporting information retrieval? The searchers were asked to search Pubmed and CiteULike for information on a specific assigned topic. Screen capture software, a think aloud protocol and an exit interview were used to capture the impressions of the users when faced with traditional classification or user tags. This data was analysed to explore the use of indexing terms by the participants as well as their use of other features in each system that support information finding and refinding. Participants selected their own keywords for searches on both tools. At the end of the search process, participants were asked to make a list of what terms they would now use if asked to search for this information again. Three sets of data were thus available for analysis: sets of initial and final keywords selected by the user, the recording of the search session and think aloud, and recorded exit interviews after the search session, all of which can be analysed to examine user impressions of the search process and the utility of the keywords in the process.
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Participants tended to prefer the search experience on the system used first, regardless of previous experience with either system. All users used multi word keywords initially, which is unsurprising as they are in training to be librarians. At the end of the search process, when users were asked to generate a new list of keywords they would now use for the search, many separated their list of final keywords by tool showing an awareness of the need to adapt a search to different systems. Items such as the presence of full metadata, abstracts and even full text links to articles were lauded while lack of vocabulary terms, and especially missing abstracts were deemed to be impediments to search. Participants found related article links and other newer features of systems to be a significant enhancement to the search process and some participants reported or were seen using tags or user names in CiteULike for similar purposes. Many of the participants in this study made use of the related articles links provided by PubMed and discussed the possibilities presented by MeSH in Pubmed and the tags on CiteULike but did not find that the structures were in place to fully support browsing of related items by keyword or combination of keywords. As shown by Ockerbloom (2006) these webs of related items can be built automatically using existing thesaurus structures and displayed to the user. This suggests that the use of indexing structures to link related items would be worthwhile to users if they are able to see the connections between items as they browse.
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