Structure, subjectivity, and power: The provisional space of libraries within the social tagging movement

Slides used for presentation at the Virtual Symposium on Information and Technology in the Arts and Humanities, held April 22 and 23, 2015. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) Special Interest Group for Arts and Humanities (SIG AH) and the Special Interest Group for Visualization, Images, and Sound (SIG VIS).

This paper addresses the potential uses of social tagging techniques for libraries, and also examines the question of potential challenges and barriers to that use. Through the theoretical framework developed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, a distinction is drawn between the techniques available to individual users and those available to structured organizations. The author then examines two specific websites, Flickr and The National Library of Ireland’s Digital Collections, through a specific research question, in order to argue that contextual detail and the tactics for searching available to individual users make social tagging a more favorable method of research. However, it is also asserted that key discrepancies between the motivations of individuals and institutions like libraries may prevent the interests of both from becoming aligned.