Folksonomies in archives: controlled collaboration for specific documents

Abstract

Folksonomies arise in the context of the Information Society, spurred by the advent and widespread use of collaborative tools of Web 2.0, where the passive user has become both information producer and consumer. This paper attempts to answer the question: can we talk about folksonomies in archives? We start with the concept of folksonomy and an exploratory study in public archives, taking as an example the case of France, which seeks to know what the characteristics and specificities of folksonomies in archives are. It uses the technique of comparative analysis in the approach of qualitative analysis of several identified projects, settled in the scientific literature on the subject. This exploratory work seeks to be a contribution to the identification and knowledge of a poorly studied reality: folksonomies in archives. The characteristics of archival documents, with limited access and responsiveness due to legal issues also manifest in the specificity of the analyzed projects. Collaboration in indexing content is increasingly a reality, especially because it allows a greater degree of completeness of archival description. However, it was concluded that both users and the creation of access points are controlled, and not the free assigning of labels.