PollDaddy Survey – Social Tagging in VuFind
Our PollDaddy survey throughout the beta phase of our vanilla VuFind launch, produced only four responses (very disappointing!).
The survey asked users to give us their views about the social tagging feature on VuFind. Two respondents found it useful, the other two said that they didn’t. The breakdown is given below:
|
Respondent
|
Study Level
|
Faculty
|
In favour of tagging?
|
Comments
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1
|
Postgraduate |
Sciences
|
Yes, I think it’s useful
|
N/A
|
|
2
|
Postgraduate
|
Humanities
|
I don’t think it’s useful
|
I have my own bibliographical database on my laptop; too much effort to ensure everything is up to date, tags consistent, etc. Feels like too much redundancy for my needs.
|
|
3
|
Undergraduate
|
Humanities / Social Sciences
|
I don’t think it’s useful
|
I don’t think this is something I would use in case I forgot the keyword I added
|
|
4
|
Undergraduate
|
Humanities / Social Sciences
|
Yes, I think it’s useful
|
If there is a need for the same items many times it will be a gain of time to tag it instead of looking for it again and again. If the keywords are added to everyone’s catalogue it could be an easy way to recommend an item to friends
|
We have not noted any great uptake of social tagging or commenting in VuFind yet. Some interest was expressed by an academic (resulting from an email correspondence titled “What is a tag, and why would I want to be the first to add one?”), but our impression from the limited evidence so far is that people are not engaging with this functionality.
There could be many reasons for this. Perhaps the effort required to add meaningful tags that could be used by the rest of the community, is putting people off. Maybe it is an activity not associated with an academic resource. Further investigation would be needed, but we have run out of time in this, the JISC funded phase of the project.
Tags: inf11, jisc, jiscLMS, progressPost, User testing, users, vufindkeven