zinc Roe is looking for feedback from the library and museum community as we start to map out the feature set of the next version of our book display and annotation tools. If you're interested please take a quick look at A Real Page Turner and share your thoughts. 

See more ICHIM07 photographs in our flickr group: ichim07.

I've been invited to give an update on the activities of steve.museum at the Dublin Core Annual General meeting. While I can't be in Singapore, this invitation did provide the motivation to do a podcast providing an update on where we are with the steve.museum research and highlighting some very early research results. You can download the podcast here.

We're definitely seeing differences in behaviour between tagging on the single-institution site at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the multi-institution site at http://tagger.steve.museum. And we're seeing differences in tagging depending on whether users see object descriptions or not, and whether they see works of art in related sets or not.

The current data collection phase is exploring the effect of showing others tags. In the fall, we'll move on to explore what happens when users can select works to tag. We had some great discussion about what 'choice' means at the steve summer meeting on Grindstone.

Exploring characteristics of social classification
Xia Lin, Joan E. Beaudoin, Yen Bui, and Kaushal Desai (Drexel University, USA)
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/sigcr/sigcr-06lin.pdf

- reference to his sig-cr paper in 1997 that talked about distributed indexing
- paper reports on work in doctoral seminar @ Drexel
- IMLS-funded project: interdisciplinary perspectives on information organization in the digital environment
- Is there a paradigm shift from traditional information organization to digital information organization?
- contrasts traditional/thesaurus (concept-based, static, domain-specific, constructed, independent of documents) with digital/dynamic (connection-based, dynamic, social-network based [ jt-same words ≠ social network] , large-scale, integrated document and concept space)

Experiments done in class
1. compare terms w controlled vocabulary

I gave a presentation today, remotely, to the Accessibility Working Group of the Dublin Core Annual Meeting about the work that the steve.museum consortium is doing exploring social tagging and folksonomy in art museums. The podcast is online, here.

The presentations reinforced for me the developing understanding of the nature of public and professional vocabularies, or wild and domesticated metadata and the dangers of presenting these as either/or options. Rather, we should be observing the development of these distinctions, the "lects" that Marc Davis talked about at the WWW2006 tagging workshop in Edinburgh, to see what we can learn about the characteristics of these different groups.

If inclusion, and diversity, are things that we value, then the rationale for such an exercise should be self-evident.

/jt