Paper short abstract:

On the basis of the case study on user habits in digital folklore archives, the paper will provide in-depth discussion of social tagging and peculiarities of the created folksonomy at the Digital Archives of Latvian Folklore (garamantas.lv).

Paper long abstract:

Garamantas.lv — the digital archives of Latvian Folklore, established in 2014, provides users with various possibilities of knowledge sharing and content transformation, including transcription and translation of manuscripts and audio recordings, adding complementary information, as well as social tagging. Garamantas.lv is chosen as a base for the case study to explore user habits in digital folklore archives and their involvement outcomes to raise intelligibility of the digital archives.

Keywords added during the manuscript transcription provides a particular type of metadata that usually serves as subjective essence of the content and can be used for classifying and searching through the large and varied data. Furthermore, empowering users to generate their own metadata, provides with a possibility to follow how bottom-up information structuring, i.e. folksonomies, are created and how they function in parallel or as a substitution for the institutionally created taxonomies.

In the presentation we will discuss the necessity of editorial intervention in the process of social tagging; furthermore, by providing statistical and content analysis we will reveal user habits of social tagging and provide analysis of the created folksonomy (consisting of more than 2000 keywords by the end of 2016) in garamantas.lv, as well as its intersection with archival taxonomies.