Dear Marieke and Christian,

Allthough your remarks and comments are pertinent, Christian, I still find that the comment/annotations produced by visitors on cultural resources can be extremely interesting.

This discussion clearly should be situated or linked with the debate that is going on between the folksonomy community, that proposes a bottom-up approach to resource description, and the traditional information science field that proposes top-down coordinated tools such as thesauri. 
Unfortunately, these approaches are all to often seen as exclusive one to another, but there are a lot of situations where both approaches result in a better resource description. Tagclouds offered by social bookmarking services such as http://del.icio.us/ can be for example very usefull to identify new emmerging concepts that can be proposed as candidate-descriptors for thesauri.  

Currently I am submitting my article "Spectator becomes annotator: possibilities offered by user-generated image metadata within the cultural heritage sector" that deals precisely with this issue. In this article I present the case study of the image database of the National Archives of the Netherlands (http://beeldbank.nationaalarchief.nl/). This website gives the opportunity to users to comment on images. When clicking on "Laatst gegeven commentaar lezen" one can read the recent comment that has been posted. In some cases these comments contain personal, subjective information (one can have a very interesting discussion on the value of this  type of information to the larger community of users) but in most cases these comments contain precisely elaborated descriptions that exceed the informational value of the minimal metadata procured by the collection holder.

Do not hesitate to contact me personally if you are aware of interesting case studies that demonstrate the (non)use of user-generated metadata.

Kind regards, 

Seth van Hooland 
ULB - Faculté de philosophie et lettres 
Dpt SIC - filière STIC 
Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 CP 123 
1050 Bruxelles 
Bât. DC.11.203 
+32 2 650 40 80   

Op 28-feb-06, om 09:01 heeft Dr. Christian Müller-Straten het volgende geschreven:

Hi Marieke,

you call it a "great concept". That makes me wonder why.
What makes visitors (laymen) generally more knowledgable than studied
curators? As I am informed, it is one of the main issues and
responsabilities of museums to inform the visitors, not the visitors to
inform museum staff or other visitors. As I am informed, such a place
wook loose the right to call itself museum, as main ICOM duties of a
museum are not performed.
I would not even go so far to call such an idea "concept". It looks like
a joke or game, an experiment without control, and based in doubts in
the abilities of museum professionals.

For all people promoting such an idea I would just suggest: Visit
incognito an exhibition of any kind (art or other), listen to the
visitors and their remarks. I do this as often as I can. You will be
surprised... It very, very often starts with nonsense, wrong object
identification, goes to false historical remarks, and ends in wrong
connections to present and future.

Oil in the fire?

Best regards


Christian


"Marieke Van Damme" <[log in to unmask]> schrieb:
Hello-
I was just reading my latest issue of the Curator
Journal (p. 122) about the Brooklyn Museum of Art and
the National Museum of the American Indian having
"community curators", that is, "ordinary" museumgoers,
write the object labels in exhibits. Has anyone done
this with success/failure? Is there a place I can go
to learn more about it? I think it is a great concept
but I'd like to see who else has tried it.

Thanks, 
Marieke

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