Have just found this study of tagging and health resources completed earlier this year on the CILIP cataloguing site.
Conclusions of the study propose that tags could be a useful addition to controlled vocabularies:
“The differing terminology use in tag lists suggests that tagging may be a working
example of Vannevar Bush’s associative trails. He argued that associative trails better
represented how users actually work with their documents: by association rather than by
categorisation. (Bush, 1945) This suggests that user tagging could provide additional access
points to traditional controlled vocabularies and provide users with the associative classifications necessary to tie documents and articles to time and task relationships, which users find useful, aswell as other associations which are new and novel.
Kipp, M. E. I. (2007). Tagging for health information organisation and retrieval. Proceedings of the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization. Vol. 1. Available:http://dlis.sir.arizona.edu/1909
