The following is a text-only Project Profile from the federal Institute
of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). An HTML version of this release,
with hot-linked information, can be viewed on the agency's Web site at
http://www.imls.gov/profiles/Nov08.shtm.

 

 

November 3, 2008

 

Press Contacts

202-653-4632

Jeannine Mjoseth, [log in to unmask]

Mamie Bittner, [log in to unmask]

 

Steve Eases Online Searches of Museum Web Sites

 

For museums seeking greater and more engaged audiences for their online
collections, steve.museum may offer some answers. The concept is simple:
individuals contribute descriptions about the art (and other collection
objects) on museum Web sites using the steve tagger, a free, open-source
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source>  software tool developed by
the steve.museum project. That's it. Museums say that the descriptions,
also known as 'tags,' improve access to their online collections because
tags make it easier for others to search for art. The tags also help
museum educators and docents better understand how their visitors see
and experience their collections. Taggers say that tagging art is fun,
requires them to look closely at the art, and makes them feel connected
to the museums and their collections. The Institute of Museum and
Library Services (IMLS) has awarded three National Leadership Grants
(NLG) to advance the steve project because it is an innovative, national
project with many collaborators.

 

Steve is not an acronym or an individual, just a friendly-sounding name
for an idea that bubbled up in 2004 discussions at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. Met staff wanted to bridge the "semantic gap"
between patrons using search tools on its newly-redesigned Web site and
the technical language used by the museum to document the digitized art
works. Online visitors tend to search for art using representational
descriptions, colors, and emotions. The Met determined that the best way
to find terms that people would use for searches was to ask them for
keywords. After experimenting with paper prototypes, the Met and other
interested members of the museum community agreed that what they really
needed was tagging software. 

 

"Most museums don't have the resources to develop software on their
own," said Susan Chun, who helped originate and develop steve when she
worked at the Met as General Manager for Collections Information
Planning. "Steve is based on a philosophy of collaboration that assumes
we do better as a group of organizations than on our own. The best
tools, processes, and methods are the ones that we create together in a
dialogue that's thoughtful, inclusive, and intended for both large and
small museums." Chun now heads her own consulting firm.

 

Started as a volunteer project in 2005, the Met and its museum
collaborators developed steve tagger 1.0 software. In 2006, eight
museums on the project team (including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of
Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
the Rubin Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
were supported by an NLG grant to further refine the steve software and
to answer the research question, 'Can social tagging and folksonomy
improve access to art museum collections online? Folksonomy is the
practice of collaboratively creating and managing tags to categorize
content.

 

The answer is yes! A formal report will be issued later this year but
preliminary results show that the majority of tags submitted by
non-museum professionals were useful. During the study, 2,275
individuals participated in tagging 1,784 works of art. In doing so,
they contributed 93,380 tags describing these works. When museum
professionals were asked whether or not they felt that the tags
submitted were useful for describing or finding those works, the results
show that 88 percent of tags were thought to be useful.

 

"The public doesn't describe works of art in the same way museums do,"
said Robert Stein, Chief Information Officer at the Indianapolis Museum
of Art and Project Director of the IMLS grant. "The submitted tags were
different than the information museums already have. In fact, 86 percent
of all tags were not in the museums' wall label text. And, as useful as
they are, most tags can't be mined from sources other than individual
taggers. "We think tags can offer a nice browsing opportunity for folks
not familiar with our collections," Stein said. 

 

In the first NLG grant, Steve collaborators developed a set of software
tools for the collection and analysis of user tags, studied
institutional attitudes towards tagging among staff at the partner
institutions, and examined online users' behaviors when searching museum
Web sites.

 

Improving the ability to search museum Web sites is increasingly
important because of the explosion of online activity. In 2006, 42
million adults visited art museum Web sites and 78 million adults
visited the Web sites of all types of museums, according to the
InterConnections: The IMLS Study on the Use of Libraries, Museums, and
the Internet <http://interconnectionsreport.org/>  (January 2008). 

 

Once the steve team established that tagging is useful, the next
question was how to get the technology into the hands of museum
personnel. This problem will be addressed by a second NLG grant, Steve
in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied, which was recently
awarded to the New Media Consortium (NMC) in Austin, TX. The three-year
project will apply the research findings to make steve accessible to a
wider variety of institutions and people. During the next year, steve
researchers plan to work with at least 30 museums and cultural heritage
institutions of all sizes and collection types to adopt steve. Together,
they will explore how social tagging engages and rewards the visitor;
what are the uses and benefits of social tagging for institutions and
their visitors; and what kinds of support and resources are required by
institutions hoping to institute social tagging practices. 

 

Stein, Chun, and their steve collaborators hope that user-generated tags
will eventually allow different kinds of collections to be linked
together. For example, tags on a painting of a thunderstorm could link
to scientific information on storm formation living on library or
science museum Web sites. The tags would tie the collections together,
which has enormous potential for educators and students, said Stein.

 

A third 2008 NLG grant, T3: Text, Tagging and Trust to Improve Image
Access for Museums and Libraries, builds on previous steve research. The
University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and
College of Information Studies will partner with steve collaborators to
explore technological ways to weight specific high-value tags so that
they rise to the top. For example, a passionate and knowledgeable car
enthusiast viewing an image of a '57 Chevy will contribute tags that
curators might never know. T3 will try to answer the question, "how can
you automate the process and pre-identify trustworthy contributors who
provide 'high value tags.'" 

 

The software and research findings produced by the steve project are
available to anyone with an interest, whether or not they formally
represent a museum. For institutions considering trying steve, there are
many ways to be involved, Stein noted. 

 

"Not every museum will be comfortable displaying users' tags online.
But, even if museums don't display tags, they can still provide useful
information about what the viewers see and feel. In our museum, we are
using tags in training our docents how to describe works of art," Stein
said. 

 

"Tagging reassures museum visitors that they are valuable to us. It
matters to us what they think and we can be responsive to them," Chun
said. "Our goal is to have push button installations so that small
museums with no IT (information technology) department can use steve."

 

 

 


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