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:

I've just been playing with another experimental image indexing tool, that's using image analysis to suggest keywords for images, called ALIPR: Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures. You feed it an image file, or a URL to a web accessible image, and it suggests keywords that might apply to that image. You're then prompted to correct the suggestions, and add alteratives, so the program "learns" through user feedback and prompting.

I'm at the SIG-CR workshop on before the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Austin TX, listening to information scientists discuss Social Classification. Papers on-line at http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/sigcr/events.html

Catherine Stiles blogged some concepts from her paper given at the Australian Historical Society in Canberra –– How Web 2.0 will change history - Possible futures for websites of the National Archives of Australia PDF on-line –– about implications of web 2.0 for museums, and ponders the requirement for radical trust of users. She's contrasted museum and library attitudes (citing lending as an example), and prompted responses from Jim Spadaccini and Bryan Kennedy among others. This brought me back to questions about institutional origins (that often influence attitudes) something i've been pondering in the context of "convergence" between libraries, archives and museums.

'Tagging' gives Web a human meaning | CNET News.com You have to keep going until the last page... but if you plow through the discussion of the basics of tagging, you'll find that steve has intrigued Thomas Vander Wal enough for him to mention us (though not specifically). I talked with him yesterday about steve when we were both at a Symposium on Social Architecture ... and it looks like there's some follow-up in the cards.

Amazon.com: All Products Search Results: garden canada

I love Amazon's suggestions for things that I might be interested in, but sometimes the engine misfires. This one is quite lovely: