The role of users in the organization of digital information: A Portuguese experience in an academic museum and archive setting

Abstract

With the evolution of digital platforms, ordinary users have gained the opportunity to participate in the organization of digital knowledge. This has given rise to folksonomies or social indexing, and the duty of information services to integrate user participation in the organization of their digital collections, and thus incorporate folksonomies in their information organization practices. This article presents a case study of the involvement of users of an academic museum and archive in the indexing of a set of resources within a project on digital preservation. The main objective of this study was to analyse the labels or tags suggested by a group of six students from several scientific areas who participated in the experience, and explain the criteria they used to choose and assign the terms to represent the content of the documents. The responses were categorized based on content analysis. The labels assigned by the students were also compared with the indexing terms used by information professionals. Although the students were not familiar with the methods of information professionals, they gained enough sensitivity to understand the need for term validation and recognize that term selection is a subjective choice.