PennTags: En kvantitativ empirisk studie av en read/write OPAC

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study the phenomenon of read/write OPAC by looking at how students at Pennsylvania University use PennTags in order to influence document descriptions in the library catalogue. The main questions to be answered are to what extent PennTags is being used in different subject areas and what users contribute to document descriptions through tagging in different subject areas. Studying the posts created by a sample of PennTags users from a quantitative approach I try to find out if there is reason to believe that the activity of users and users’ possibility to make meaningful contributions are dependent of the subject matter being dealt with in documents described, as anticipated by the theory of pace layering. I find that user interest in influencing the library catalogue through PennTags appears to be low in general, with exception for in the subject areas of the main classes Language and literature and Social sciences in Library of Congress Classification. Users do however make meaningful contributions to the document descriptions through tagging in 59 % of the cases. The results support only vague evidence of the connection anticipated by the theory of pace layering and I suggest that other explanatory models must be sought in order to understand user behaviour in systems like PennTags.