The Philadelphia Museum of Art has 'soft launched' a tagging application integrated into their on-line collections catalogue.

A tag cloud -- at http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/socialTagging.html -- shows tags assigned anonymously to the collection (tags don't seem to be linked to users though PMA has a My Museum / Gallery feature). Tags in the cloud are sized by frequency; the sequencing isn't immediately obvious.

Any user can add tags to a work, at the collection record. Tags can also be deleted by any user.

Tags are shown in the cloud immediately [presumably with some sort of filtering].

/jt

i've recently taken a look at a year's worth of search log data from the Guggenheim Collection on-line -- a pilot study for some work within the steve.museum project. I've attached a draft paper to this post -- comments are welcome! It's still rough in spots, but I need to step back.

One of our premises in discussing folksonomy in the museum is that allowing users to tag collections will improve their retrivability... but surprisingly, we know almost nothing about what searchers of museum collections really do. i couldn't find a single serious IR study in the museum domain. There's lots of literature about what we 'should' do, how standards will help and why controlled vocabularly is really important, with almost no evidence to support those claims. We need to look hard at the data.

Notable findings in the Guggenheim data: