Distributed authority control in the age of web 2.0:

The case of LibraryThing

Amanda WatsonQuestioning Authority conference

March 29, 2008

http://www.librarything.com

Part of the LibraryThing tag cloud

Combining and separating works

Combined tags: “19th century”

Detail: author page for Mark Twain, showing combined name variants

Common Knowledge page for The Hobbit

Expert vs. crowd

Images:

“Authority of Law” sculpture by James Earle Fraser, U.S. Supreme Court (photo credit: D. B. King)

Rally in Union Square, early 1910s (Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Collection)

LC subject search for “Cookery, Italian”

Subject headings and tags in action

Disambiguation: William Gibson

Popular & unpopular authors

J. R. R. Tolkien Barnabe Barnes

LibraryThing for Libraries (Claremont Colleges)

Title confusion in Web of Science

Thank you!

Amanda Watson (amanda . watson @ gmail . com)