Social indexing is an approach to manual indexing of web content. The purpose of this master thesis has been to investigate terminological and conceptual consistency in social indexing of web content. Conceptual consistency was investigated/measured focusing on synonyms and (the use of) singular and plural forms of words. In order to measure consistency in social indexing data were obtained from the Delicious website. The data set consists of five indexed objects, 3001 tags and 239 users. Synonym tags and singular and plural forms of words were identified and grouped. The indexing consistency was then calculated on five user groups, each containing twenty users. The users’ sets of tags were represented in vector spaces and each user’s vector was measured against the group’s average vector using the cosine measure. The indexing consistency was found to be low. An average terminological consistency of 15.4 % and an average conceptual consistency of 18.5 % were achieved. Synonym tags and singular and plural forms of words do affect terminological consistency but not to any great extent. The low (terminological) consistency may therefore not solely be attributed to the presence of synonyms and singular and plural forms of words among the users’ tags. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The aim of this master thesis was to measure the terminological consistency when indexing fiction. The study included ten participants, five librarians and five patrons who indexed two novels in three steps. Besides calculating the terminological consistency a typified index based on the term frequency was created.Subject heading list Att indexera skönlitteratur was used as a controlled vocabulary and to calculate the consistency the asymmetrical formula was used.The result showed that the study produced relatively high consistency values compared to other studies. The subject heading list increased the consistency value for all of the participants, for the patrons the increase was substantial. The librarians produced higher consistency values compared to the patrons in almost every step and they had in percentage lower amount of terms used only once. / Program: Bibliotekarie