The Nature of Tags in a Knowledge Organization System of Primary Visual Resources

The study examined user-generated tags to digitized primary visual archival resources to identify the nature of tags as image description. A collection of 3,191 tags from a digital portal (NINES) was used for the study. The tags were analyzed in terms of the attributes of primary archival visual resources users described. The tags were also compared to metadata to detect their relationship with metadata. The findings help understand users' tagging behavior and resource interpretation in primary and historical visual resources in humanities domains. The results of this study demonstrate the value of tags in identifying and determining user points of view and tags' potential to represent and connect to metadata description and to support discovery of relevant resources.