Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept

Abstract

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.

A comparative study of Flickr tags and index terms in a general image collection

“…Indexers who rely on controlled vocabularies are reluctant to incorporate users' vernacular language. Impediments include indexers' training and experience (Bearman & Trant, 2005) and their skepticism of social tagging (Trant, 2006). Because users'language does not match that of the indexers, the utility and precision of indexing systems cannot be maximized (Jörgensen, 1999).…”

“…A few museums have seized the opportunity presented by social tagging (Bearman & Trant, 2005;Trant, 2006) to improve indexing and access to their image and art collections. Established cultural heritage institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art are already testing tagging by untrained professionals (Bearman & Trant, 2005;Trant, 2006). Some (e.g., Macgregor & McCulloch, 2006) argue that social tagging and professional indexing will have their own separate but complementary roles to play in information organization, access, and retrieval in the future.…”

“…For instance, images in the cultural heritage domain could be tagged and annotated by users knowledgeable about local history and language (Matusiak, 2006). A few museums have seized the opportunity presented by social tagging (Bearman & Trant, 2005;Trant, 2006) to improve indexing and access to their image and art collections. Established cultural heritage institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art are already testing tagging by untrained professionals (Bearman & Trant, 2005;Trant, 2006).…”

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

“…For instance, the Brooklyn Museum (Bernstein, 2008) uses Web 2.0 applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, to support the clustering of user communities; Steve.museum (Trant, 2006) employs folksonomies and social tagging to support the navigation of vast collections from a user perspective (instead of the one held by the curator); the New York Public Library extracts tags from metadata to integrate a traditional search with folksonomies (Dalton, 2010). However, user-generated content can cause an explosion of the amount of available information, so that users lose the "awareness" of what is happening and of the most interesting contributions to inspect.…”

Metadata for semantic and social applications<br />DC- 2008 Berlin

“…Christine DeZelar-Tiedman University of Minnesota Libraries, USA dezel002@tc.umn.edu Keywords: LibraryThing; social tagging; controlled vocabulary; library catalogs Many libraries and other cultural institutions are incorporating Web 2.0 features and enhanced metadata into their catalogs (Trant 2006). These value-added elements include those typically found in commercial and social networking sites, such as book jacket images, reviews, and usergenerated tags.…”