The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

For those who are interested in social tagging, or who might have missed the Community Engagement session at MW2008, I have uploaded my slides "Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags" along with audio track to Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/s.mannion/seeing-tibetan-art-through-social-tags/

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

• share images and tags
• invite others to participate, and
• display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.

Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

At the steve.museum session at MCN we devoted a significant amount of time to "Term Review" –– what we're calling the qualitative study of tags by professionals from participating museums within the context of the steve.museum research project. It fed really nicely into a discussion at the project team research meeting post-MCN.

For some, the very possibility that tags contributed by taggers of works of art might be reviewed by museums is antithetical to the ethos of user tagging. But, within the context of steve.museum it's essential for developing our understanding of the contribution that tagging and folksonomy might make to the accessibility of works of art on-line.

How, for example, can we respond to our colleagues' concern that tags will be inaccurate | misleading | misspelled | mis-guided, if we don't look at them and see if they are? How can we say that they might be useful, if we haven't looked?

i was supposed to be in Brazil this morning, talking about "Social Tagging and Access to Collections". unfortunately, visa problems made that trip impossible. the presentation was made via podcast; i've put the files on-line.

it's an introduction to the issues that we're exploring in the steve.museum project – how social tagging might enable access to art collections – focusing on the gap between user interests (as we know them from queries and reference questions) and museum documentation as created by and for professionals. This work is more formally presented in other steve papers (see below).

that gap exists partially because our documentation standards are theoretical; designed by and for professionals to serve museum functions. i've participated in many initiatives that explored aspects of access to collections – CHIN, FDA, AITF/CDWA, CIDOC, MESL, AMICO – winner take all in the aconymble contest – and don't dispute this as a valid first premise. it's a place we had to start from, but it may not put us in a good position to support public access.

museum data is still seldom shared beyond the bounds of local systems; and when it is, in early cases like MESL or building The AMICO Library, we discover that institutions adapt standards, rather than adopting them. merging data from disparate sources is hard. we compromise on what has to be merged and end up with thin (lowest common denominator) descriptions that may not be adequate for differentiation between similar objects, and may not support user needs.

i'm more convinced, since the discussion with seb and mike about the contribution of tags, that we need to look at the types of terms we're getting as tags and the types of terms searched, when we build on my preliminary analysis of Guggenheim search logs as part of the steve.museum term analysis.

that way, we'll be able to learn a bit more about the relationship between tag, searches, and documentation structures, and do it within the context of searchers' needs.