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. Social Tagging (the collective assignment of keywords to resources) and its resulting Folksonomy (the assemblage of concepts expressed in such a cooperatively developed system of classification) offer ways for art museums to engage with their communities and to understand what users of on-line museum collections see as important. Proof of Concept studies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art compared terms assigned by trained cataloguers and untrained cataloguers to existing museum documentation, and explored the potential for social tagging to improve access to museum collections. These preliminary studies, the results of which are reported here, have shown the potential of social tagging and folksonomy to open museum collections to new, more personal meanings. Untrained cataloguers identified content elements not described in formal museum documentation. Results from these tests -the first in the domainprovided validation for exploring social tagging and folksonomy as an access strategy within The Metropolitan Museum, motivation to proceed with a broader inter-institutional collaboration, and input into the development of a multi-institutional collaboration exploring tagging in art museums. Tags assigned by users might help bridge the semantic gap between the professional discourse of the curator and the popular language of the museum visitor. The steve collaboration (http://www.steve.museum) is building on these early studies 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.

While 'convergence' has been a topic of much discussion in the museum, archive and library communities, the emerging similarities between these three types of cultural heritage institutions -

The collections of art museums have been assembled over hundreds of years and described, organized and classified according to traditions of art historical research and discourse. Art museums, in their role as curators and interpreters of the cultural record, have developed standards for the description of works of art (such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art, CDWA) that emphasize the physical nature of art as artefact, the authorial role of the creator, the temporal and cultural context of creation and ownership, and the scholarly significance of the work over time. Collections managers have recorded conservation, exhibition, loan and publication history, along with significant volumes of internal documentation of acquisition and storage, that support the custody and care of artefacts of significant cultural value. But the systems of documentation and classification that support the professional discourse of art history and the management of museum collections have failed to represent the interests, perspectives or passions of those who visit [use?] museum collections, both on-site and online. As museums move to reflect the breadth of their audiences and the diversity of their perspectives, so must museum documentation change to reflect concerns other than the traditionally art historical and museological.

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With the speed that characterizes the entire Internet phenomenon, the International Conference on Museums and the Web, which broke new ground when it was first held in 1997, has already become an annual event of major importance to the museum world. The co‐chairs of the 1999 Conference, themselves path‐breakers in this new medium, describe how participants viewed the transformations taking place. David Bearman, President of Archives & Museum Informatics, consults on information management for cultural heritage institutions worldwide. Since 1991, he has organized and chaired the biennial conferences of the International Cultural Heritage Information Meeting (ICHIM) and is the author of over 125 books and articles on museum and archives information management issues. Jennifer Trant is a partner in Archives & Museum Informatics and was also co‐chair of ICHIM99. She serves as executive director of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), and editor‐in‐chief of Archives and Museum Informatics, the cultural heritage informatics quarterly from Kluwer Academic Publishers. She is on the programme committee of the Digital Libraries 1999 conference, and the board of the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums.