The Possibility of Replacing or Completing Library of Congress Subject Headings by LibraryThing's Social Tags (Case Study: Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences)

To explore the match between Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and LibraryThing’s social tags and the possibility of replacing or completing LCSH by LibraryThing’s social tags in humanities, social science and natural science books.
Content analysis. Selecting 160 books in each domain and using coding, the exact, relative and approximate match and mismatch between headings and tags were recognized. Data gathered using LC bibliographic and authority records and LibraryThing records and analyzed using coverage percentage and Jaccard Similarity Coefficient.
There were 1311 social tags (484 tags in natural sciences, 422 in social sciences and 405 in humanities), 580 of which (43%) had exact and approximate match and 301 cases (23%) had relative match with LCSH. Also, Jaccard Similarity Coefficient calculation rejected the replacement of headings by tags in all three domains.
The replacement of LCSH by social tags is not possible and they can only be regarded as completion.