Steve.museum

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article by Alexia Dawson

Contents 1 What is Folksonomy? 2 Motivation for use 3 Early development 4 Powerhouse Museum 5 steve.museum 6 How to use steve.museum tagging 7 References 8 Resources

What is Folksonomy?

In order to understand the use of folksonomy in museums, it is necessary to understand social tagging and folksonomy itself. Social Tagging Social Tagging and Folksonomy as defined by Wikipedia as used in this article refers to the practice of assigning keywords to a website or other resource for the use of other social taggers. Folksonomy is the use of collaboratively created classifications to define and search for objects, be it websites, books or art. This user-centered practice allows anyone to attach descriptive terms to resources. The websites Del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati harness the power of social tags and offer the web applications needed to apply and search within the user defined keywords.

It is important to note that social tagging and bookmarking are discreet practices. Bookmarking denotes saving a link to information for future use. It does not require keywords or categorizing although those features can be added to a bookmark. The keywords and the ease of sharing those tagged items are what separates social tagging from the more simple bookmarking. This being said, the use of bookmarking in museums may be considered a stepping stone to true museum folksonomy. This will be discussed in the Early development section of this article.

Motivation for use

The motives for integrating Web 2.0 practices into a museum environment can vary by institution depending on what that organization would like to accomplish. Filippini-Fantoni and Bowen, in their 2007 article 'Bookmarking in Museums', listed such motives as:

• "to prolong the museum experience"
• "build stronger relationship with the visitor"
• "facilitate the learning process"

A New York Times article noted, patrons are typically unable to find a painting on a museum's website without knowing the standard categorical data it would be filed with such as the artist's name, the title of the work, the date of the work, and the specific artistic medium (O'Connell 2007). Jennifer Trant summarizes, "documentation of art museum collections has been traditionally written by and for art historians. To make art museum collections broadly accessible, and to enable art museums to engage their communities, means of access need to reflect the perspectives of other groups and communities," (Trant 2006). This solution requires a new "user-generated taxonomy". The new taxonomy, created by the common folk is now referred to as folksonomy. Grass-roots metadata allows the public to map a more personal meaning to art and thereby allows new associations to be formed (Spiteri 2007). As users define the meaning of creative works, they may discover other works that have been assigned similar meaning. The development of such a community can nurture informal education among a vast and diverse population.

Early development

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (also known as "the Met" or the "MMA") began research on user created metadata. In the original test "volunteers upplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork". The tags produced by this experiment varied widely from the actual catalog data assigned to each item. Susan Chen, collections information manager at the Met, was stunned by the obvious "semantics gap". The early testing of social tagging at the Met was a closed experiment with select users. This was intended to be a proof of concept before initiating a full-scale collaboration. Concurring research prompted a deeper investigation in the form of a two-year grant project, the steve.museum tagging project (O'Connell 2007).

Key partners in the steve.museum project include:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Denver Art Museum
• Guggenheim Museum
• Minneapolis Institute of Arts
• Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Powerhouse Museum

The power of a deployed museum folksonomy is elegantly illustrated by Australia's Powerhouse Museum. Their grass-roots catalog has been at work since 2006. Sebastian Chan, Powerhouse's Web Services manager hopes That the "user-centered navigation" that Powerhouse's website offers can take full advantage of the freedom that web-based collections can offer. The users are not limited to viewing a curator's selection of art or "stand-alone, project-funded, virtual exhitions" (Chan 2007). Everything and anything that the museum has can be added to their online collection. at the time of Chan's 2007 article, 'Tagging and Searching', there were about 400,000 objects available to the public at their site.

steve.museum

While the Powerhouse Museum's folksonomy project is available for use to any museum visitor, the steve.museum project itself was not intended to be publicly deployed. According to Jennifer Trant, the steve.museum project was not intended to be a single institutions new Web 2.0 venture. Instead the multiple participants have joined to scientifically study the lexicon gathered through museum folksonomy. The steve project hopes to use this research to "develop shared tools and research methods that enable social tagging of art museum collections and explore the utility of folksonomy for providing enhanced access to collections" (Trant 2006).

The steve project's initial survey in Fall of 2005 resulted in 3,343 new terms for only 30 objects. 88% of the terms gathered in that test did not appear in the museum catalog data. These results alone illustrate how much variation is possible in social tagging. The next level of research included the development of a validation process to choose terms to indeed add to the collections metadata and which tags are superfluous.

How to use steve.museum tagging

"How to use the steve.museum tagger in 60 seconds" can guide you through your first museum tagging adventure.

References

Chan, S 2007, 'Tagging and Searching -Serendipity and museum collection databases', Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Available from: www.archimuse.com. [18 April 2008].

Filippini-Fantoni, S and Bowen, J 2007, 'Bookmarking in Museums: Extending The Museum Experience Beyond the Visit?', Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Available from: www.archimuse.com. [20 April 2008].

O'Connell, P 2007, 'One Picture, 1,000 Tags', The New York Times, Available from: http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/itx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents.... [18 April 2008].

Spiteri, L 2007, 'The Structure and Form of Folksonomy Tags: The Road to the Public Library Catalog', Information Technology and Libraries, vol. 26, no.3, pp. 13-25.

Stein, R 2008, 'Listening to Our Visitors: Steve.museum and the impact of social tagging for access to online collections', Institute of Museum and Library Services WebWise Conference, Miami. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/rstein/web-wise2008. [18 April 2008].

Trant, J 2006 'Curating Collections Knowledge: Museums on the Cyberinfrastructure', Museum Informatics. Available from: www.archimuse.com/papers/trant-MuseumInformatics2006.pdf. [18 April 2008].

Trant, J 2006, 'Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept', New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 83-105.

Resources

• Listening to our Visitors Slide presentation by R. Stein.
• Steve.Museum update Podcast by Jennifer Trant.
• The Use, Usefulness and Value of Museums in the U.S.
• Bookmarking in Museums

'Steve.museum by Alexia Dawson, Internet Public Library Learning Community site

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