Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums

Social tagging applications such as flickr and del.icio.us have become
extremely popular. Their socially-focussed data collection strategies
seem to have potential for museums struggling to make their collections
more accessible and to build communities of interest around their
holdings. But little is known about the terminology that visitors to
museum sites might contribute or how best to obtain both useful terms
and on-going social involvement in tagging museum collections. In the
steve.museum project, a number of art museums are collaboratively
researching this opportunity. These research questions and an
architecture for a prototype research application are presented here.
Prototypes created to date are discussed and plans for future
development and term-collection prototype deployment are presented. We
discuss the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the
requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both
to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.