Read the latest about the collective museum folksonomy project, Steve.museum from Museums & The Web 06. Our Electronic Swatchbook projects gets a mention.
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.