Search

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to present a research concerning user tagging of literary texts. The research was conducted with the aim to determine the peculiarities of the folksonomic approach to literature tagging and thematic informativity of user tags assigned to literary works of art, and to compare them with the subject heading terms from library catalogs and present the considerable potential of folksonomy in improving the traditional approach to constructing and assigning subject headings for works of fiction. Approach/methodology/design. The first section of the paper presents the basic theoretical elements of content analysis from the viewport of librarian classification, subject analysis and user tagging. The second section depicts the research results of the user tags, conducted in two phases - first, the user tag analysis on a linguistic, functional and semantic levels and then the comparison of the tags to subject headings collected from the online library catalogues. Results. The research has revealed that user tags possess a greater thematic informativity than subject headings assigned by experts and as such may serve as a good foundation for the improvement of traditional systems for content analysis of literary works. Research limitations. The research part of the paper was conducted on the author's selection of literary works and the collection of corpora of tags from the online catalogues of the National and University Library in Zagreb, the Zagreb City Library, the Library of Congress in Washington DC and the "LibraryThing" network system. Practical implications. The research can serve as an initial step for further studies of content analysis of literary works in library systems, and as a first step towards their improvement in order to provide the best possible search results for literary and artistic texts. Social implications. The results of the research imply the possibility of involving a nonlibrarian reading community and their direct contribution to the development of library systems. Originality. The paper presents a research that, for the first time in one place, shows a comparison of user tags for the prose, dramatic and poetic literary works of art with the subject headings from library catalogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]