The aim for this master’s thesis is to investigate the indexing consistency in a folksonomy Delicious. This is done by investigating how users construct tags. By applying a semiotic perspective and use analysis of content the occurrences of inflected forms, hyponymy, meronymy and users own tag creations were established. Lancaster’s seven factors is the starting point for the discussion about indexing and the factors that affects it in either a negative or positive way. The indexing consistency is calculated for the first twenty users of the five objects that are investigated. For the calculation Rolling’s method has been used but since it focuses on the indexing consistency between two users, it was adapted for the calculation of the average consistency of the first 20 users. The thesis results show that users prefer to use much the same words which mean that the average consistency for all objects is 28.34 %. Like professional indexers, the users of Delicious prefer to tag the objects with nouns and they often use the singular form. Problems arise when users create their own tags because many of these tags only occur one or two times for every object. This affects the indexing consistency in a negative way.

The main focus of this study has been to give an overview of the view on user of social tagging in research in the field of library and information science. 19 scientific articles where analyzed using qualitative texual analysis. The main focus points have been to look at the research view on user behaviour, user groups or types and user motivation, and how, and if this view has changed over time. The result shows no indication of big changes in the research. The perspective on users is changing gradually over the chosen timeframe and a more nuanced view on users is slowly becoming morepopular.This view is more centered around looking beyond the prcess of tagging as the only influence on users.