The IMLS announced today that the steve.museum application to the National Leadership Grants was successful. We'll be exploring whether social tagging and folksonomy can improve access to art museum collections on-line.

We're excited!

jt

Researching Social Tagging and Folksonomy in Art Museums

Abstract
Can social tagging and folksonomy improve access to art museum collections on-line? Our two-year research project (October 2006–September 2008) is designed to answer this question.

There are now millions of works of art from museums on the Web. But while many museums have made significant investments in developing searchable on-line databases, the content in them is often inaccessible to users who may prefer to search using keywords or subject terms rather than the specialist cataloguing of museum professionals. Museums must find ways to make their collections more accessible to the general public. The technologies of social tagging, which generate folksonomies, or publicly contributed index terms, seem promising.

To establish whether museums can take advantage of these new technologies and methods, we will conduct an experiment, developing and deploying an open-source, social tagging environment and collecting terms assigned to works of art by the public. We will analyze the resulting folksonomy along a number of different facets, including the characteristics of the users who assigned the terms and the appropriateness of the term to the work. We will rigorously evaluate the relationship of user-supplied terms to existing museum documentation, professional controlled vocabularies, general lexigraphic resources, and terms used in queries of on-line museum resources by members of the public. The subject-based nature of our research restricts project participants to art museums. Our research and analyses will enable us to assess and report on the value of social tagging and folksonomy for art museums, and to make an original contribution to the theory and practice of subject description, and on-line information resource development and distribution.

Improved understanding of the role of social tagging and folksonomy in art museums will have benefits for all museums and their publics. New strategies for subject description and indexing could break a museum resource log-jam, by providing an affordable way to provide needed subject access. Involving the public would be a significant re-alignment of museum practice. Our method for exploring this potential change, in a collaborative environment, will itself be a contribution to museum professional practice; we hope to show that by working together, each taking on a part of the project, we can reduce the risk of such a new venture to all of our institutions. Our open communications strategy allows others, particularly those from small museums unable to invest in research and development, to follow along and learn at their own speed.

The general public may find they have easier access to public collections held in trust, via folksonomy that offers an improved representation of user points-of-view, including multi-cultural perspectives. In addition, social tagging may offer an engaging form of interaction with museum objects, encouraging a sense of ownership and belonging.

There are seven museum partners: the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Rubin Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A focus on art will facilitate term analysis. Breadth of participation will strengthen our results.