In “‘By the People, For the People’: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata,” Christina Manzo, Geoff Kaufman, Sukdith Punjashitkul, and Mary Flanagan focus on the classification of digital objects in libraries. They immerse themselves in the debate over which model of classification is superior: a folksonomic model, where users generate metadata as they encounter cultural material, or an institution-imposed classification system. Manzo et al. argue that, in fact, a blended system is best. By bringing together user-generated content with expert-developed metadata, there is a larger chance of classifying materials in a way that increases findability while maintaining standardization. To prove their hypothesis, Manzo et al. run a database searching experiment with a varied group of participants and analyze results.

 

Work cited

Manzo, Christina, Geoff Kaufman, Sukdith Punjashitkul, and Mary Flanagan. 2015. “‘By the People, For the People’: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9(1): n.p.