folksonomies and discoverability

sebchan — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 22:07:34 +0000

hi jennifer

we are finding that folksonomies do enhance discoverability but that this is not as straight-forward as previously thought. i mention the latest stats in a post here (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2006/12/28/opac20-multiple-images-added/) and will be elaborating in my MW07 paper. out of 6 million object views in the last 6 months there have been 915K viewed via phrase/word searches, 947K viewed via searches using tag cloud/folksonomy keywords. most of the remainder, indeed, 63% of our traffic has come directly to an object record either from continued browsing after an inital search (visitors now average 3.4 objects per visit) or via a direct external link or via a search engine search. looking at the successful search terms there is no discernable correlation with museum activities - not surprising given the optimisation of our collection for Google using pretty standard SEO techniques. This skews our collection results substantially - in a way that other un-Google-able collections are not - and can be anecdotally supported in the type of public enquiries we now receive about people wanting to BUY our objects (not understanding that we are a museum!). that the number of succssful searches using the tag cloud words is greater than the total of other searches points to the use of folksonomy words as 'entry-points' into the collection. this has interesting implications for navigation as we are finding that folksonomy words are used as the primary navigation method slightly outranking searching. almost *no-one* uses the formal classification navigation structure. seb

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folksonomies and discoverability