Tagging Museum Collections

Steve, an open source social tagging project focused on museum collections, is exploring how folksonomies might improve access to art and encourage “engagement with cultural content.” The project invites interested users to generate descriptions of works of art using their own terms (via their Web site) as a way of supplementing the highly-structured vocabulary systems created by museum professionals. This user-generated cataloging might provide the museums with the “missing subject-based information for their collections databases” required to improve their e-resources and finding aids. Steve collaborators include the Denver Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Rubin Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

A screenshot of the user tagging tool in Steve.

Steve holds great promise for expanding access to museum collections Online, such as in the area of art education for primary and secondary students. Using a folksonomy can be a highly-effective means of capturing the “visual language” of younger students. It can aid in the discovery of works of art for school projects, allow students to compare how different artists and movements represented similar objects, and provide them with a means of expressing concepts of aesthetic response and analysis using their own words. Tagging art can also help students begin to understand and question the categories and labels that have been applied to art collections, schools, and individual artists by scholars and curators over time.

For more advanced researchers, Steve provides “a testbed for hypotheses about the social experiences offered by museums to both on-site and on-line visitors” and the ability to study the difference between “expert and non-professional vocabularies.” Researchers interested in sharing thoughts about social tagging art and related topics can participate in the Steve discussion lists. The project also plans to license data sets for analysis and to share its research findings among peer communities and institutions.

Projects links:
Steve homepage
Steve registration page (for those interested in tagging)
Steve for developers (download code)
Papers, presentations, background docs., etc.
Discussion list