User:Sils660/Steve.museum

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The central lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The steve.museum is a collaborative project whose goal is to improve public access to, and engagement with, art museum collections. To do so, it is exploring the possibilities of user-generated descriptions of works of art, also known as folksonomy.

1 Participants
2 Folksonomy & Museums
3 Criticisms
4 See also

[edit] Participants

Museum patrons look at art in the Rijksmuseum.

Currently steve’s staff comprises a group of volunteers, mostly from art museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as Archives & Museum Informatics.

[edit] Folksonomy & Museums

Folksonomy is a relatively new phenomenon whereby web-users tag content with terms that are meaningful to them, for the purposes of later retrieval. Popular examples of folksonomy are the websites Flickr, Del.icio.us, Furl, and 43things. As it often occurs in a social environment where users can view and share other users’ tags, folksonomy can be considered a form of social tagging, or social cataloging. It is an excellent means of building communities of users with common interests and vocabularies, and it encourages engagement with content, as well exploration and discovery, both of new content and new ways of tagging.

For museum libraries, folksonomy will help in several ways. First, it will allow the public to introduce new search-terms (tags) to the formal library catalog that art and cataloging professionals themselves might not have included. These terms will enrich the catalog and increase the likelihood that searchers of all levels will find what they are looking for. Second, by inviting the public to participate in the cataloging process, folksonomy will encourage individuals to engage more deeply with works of art. This engagement will be necessary in order for individuals to articulate what they feel are the important elements of a given work, and tag it in meaningful ways. Third, as individuals see how others have tagged the same works, they will come to see these works in novel ways, questioning themselves and others. And fourth, by exploring works connected by common tags, individuals will make exciting discoveries.

How would you describe this painting?

[edit] Criticisms

Critics suggest folksonomies are characterized by flaws that formal classification systems are designed to eliminate. In addition, folksonomies all but invite deliberately idiosyncratic tagging, called meta noise, which burdens users and decreases the system's information retrieval utility. Those who prefer top-down taxonomies/ontologies argue that an agreed set of tags enables more efficient indexing and searching of content.