Otherness in Library Organization Systems vs. Social Tagging

To uncover the phenomenon of otherness in assigning subjects to library materials by the Library of Congress.

384 titles on the subjects of Islam catalogued between 2016 to 2019 were retrieved from LC’s OPAC and compared with the tags assigned to them by users in the website of LibraryThing.

Average number of subjects assigned by social tagging to each title was around 15, much higher than the average 3.5 by LCHS. In addition, 83% of the tags did not match either conceptual or linguistic with the subject headings assigned. Around 68% of the tags which did not match the subject heading were taken from the content of titles.

The structure of subject headings has resulted in marginalizing some subjects, whereas tags provide an opportunity to representation others views.