Three empirical studies on characteristics of social classification are reported in this paper. The first study compared social tags with controlled vocabularies and title-based automatic indexing and found little overlaps among the three indexing methods. The second study investigated how well tags could be categorized to improve effectiveness of searching and browsing. The third study explored factors and radios that had the most significant impact on tag convergence.Finding of the three studies will help to identify characteristics of those tagging terms that are content-rich and that can be used to increase effectiveness of tagging, searching and browsing.

The goal of this study is to assess the quality of current metadata records in the NSDL repository. For this, we harvested over one million Dublin Core metadata records submitted through November 2005 to the repository using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAIP). This study reports on the preliminary results of the tabulations and assessment of metadata quality.Le but de cette étude est d’évaluer la qualité des enregistrements de métadonnées actuels à partir du référentiel d'entrepôt de la NSDL. À cette fin, nous avons recueilli plus d’un million d’enregistrements de métadonnées Dublin Core soumis au référentiel jusqu’en novembre 2005, en utilisant le Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAIP). Cette étude présente les résultats préliminaires des statistiques et de l’évaluation de la qualité des métadonnées.

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Library Reference service can benefit from the retrieval from a question/answer (Q/A) databank where previously answered reference questions can be reused, either directly or with some modifications. However, the majority of search engines rely heavily on keyword matching, and we believe there are situations in the library reference environment where the relevancy or usefulness of a retrieved item may not be limited to whether there are some linguistic similarities between the queries and entries in the databank. For example, a user who wants to find the answer to a question regarding criticisms or reviews of a particular contemporary author (such as “John Smith”) may not find a good answer readily available from doing a keyword search using the author's name. However, if the search returns recommendations for reliable information resources regarding reviews or criticisms of contemporary authors (e.g. the NY Times Review Archive of Contemporary Authors), the user can go to these resources to search for this particular author “John Smith”. In this paper, an alternative retrieval system that offers a new way of finding useful information for library reference service is presented and discussed. An experiment is conducted where the retrieval engine searches for similar and/or useful question/answer pairs in a knowledge bank in response to a new query.