Are Tags from Mars and Descriptors from Venus? A Study on the Ecology of Educational Resource Metadata

In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to study the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags on the one hand, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as the repository, its resources and all stakeholders that included the managers, metadata indexers and the whole community of users. We found an interplay between tags and descriptors and showed how tags can enrich and add value to multilingual controlled vocabularies in various ways. We also showed that, even if many tags can be seen as redundant in terms of the existing LOM, some of them can become a useful source of metadata for repository owners, and help them better understand users’ needs and demands.