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 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 (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.”