Tags on healthcare information websites

This paper explores tags and tagging behaviour on health information websites using an empirical, user-oriented, exploratory case study. Taggers and editors were interviewed about tags and tagging, while taggers solved tasks that included applying tags to a website. This qualitative data was combined with quantitative data; a transaction log analysis that included all tags applied to the site during the logging period. Results showed that taggers and editors disagreed both on the purpose of tags and what characterizes a good tag. Taggers applied tags to describe article content, explain articles, request information, and value article content. Some of these show that tags are not only not only topical descriptions, but communicative by intent. This result can potentially inform the design of tagging features.