The steve.museum project was a collaborative effort to improve public access to and engagement with US
art museum
An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own Collection (artwork), collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. A ...
collections. It explored the possibilities of user-generated descriptions of works of art, also known as
folksonomy
Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...
. Project staff in 2011 comprised a group of volunteers, mostly from art museums, including the
Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...
, the
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...
, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...
, as well as
Archives & Museum Informatics
__NOTOC__
Archives & Museum Informatics is a company based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (and previously Pittsburgh, USA), that organizes conferences, and undertakes consulting, publishing and training in the field of cultural heritage, especially ...
.
In a
folksonomy
Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...
users tag content for the purposes of later retrieval. It allows the public to introduce new search-terms, in the form of
tags, to the formal
library catalog
A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also c ...
that art and cataloging professionals themselves might not have included. It also allows curators and other museum professionals to see what the public sees in works of art.
These terms will enrich the catalog and increase the likelihood that searchers of all levels will find what they are looking for. In the end, it is hoped that museum collections will be fully searchable by keywords rather than just by name or artist.
Early results from the project found that a number of tags were applied often, while others were applied just once per work of art.
The project received a $1 million grant from the US
Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mis ...
,
from which the
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is an encyclopedic art museum located at Newfields, a campus that also houses Lilly House, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres, the Gardens at Newfields, the Beer Garden, and more. It i ...
is working to apply folksonomy to its collection,
and is one of a number of related projects currently working to make art more accessible and to find its role in the digital age.
See also
*
Folk taxonomy
A folk taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, as distinct from scientific taxonomy. Folk biological classification is the way people traditionally describe and organize their natural surroundings/the world around them, typically making generou ...
*
Museum informatics
Museum informatics is an interdisciplinary field of study that refers to the theory and application of informatics by museums. It represents a convergence of culture, digital technology, and information science.[Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...]
*
Tag (metadata)
In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, multimedia, database record, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again ...
References
External links
steve.museum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Steve Museum
Year of establishment missing
Folksonomy
Museum informatics
Collaborative projects
*Steve Museum