Social Tagging and Museums

I’d like to talk about an interesting example of “Folksonomy” (social tagging) from the arts and cultural sector called Steve Museum. Originally conceived by independent museum specialist, Susan Chun, in 2005, the Steve Museum is a collaborative project between museums, independent museum professionals, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (ILMS) that uses social tagging of artwork as a way to connect with new audiences, improve public access to a museum’s collections and improve indexing of artwork by allowing visitor to add their own tags to a work of art.

In a nutshell here's how Steve Museum works: Member institutions can upload pictures and make sets of their collections using  “Steve Tagger”, an open-sourced software that was developed by the Steve Museum. Once the works of art are uploaded, the public can view the works of art, tag them, and share them with their friends, much in the same way as they would in Flickr. It should be noted that membership to the Steve Museum and access to all the software and technical support is free of charge and available to any museum that is interested in joining this project.

Although at present only a handful of art museums such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Indianapolis Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are members, this project is currently receiving a lot of press from professional museum service organizations such as AAM (American Association of Museums), and ILMS. Accordingly, I predict that many more museums will also become members within the next couple years.

I predict that this project has several possible benefits to museums in the long run :

1) By allowing the public to add social tags to works of art, “Steve Tagger” can improve a museum’s ability to come up with categories or tags that are relevant to the average musem-goer. Current museum categories (which are for the most part based on the curator’s definitions) are in some cases very different from the categories or descriptors that a museum-goer might associate with a picture. For example if we take the Mona Lisa, the curator’s tags might describe the artist (Leonardo da Vinci), the period it was painted in (The Italian Renaissance) and other technical facts about the painting. By contrast, the viewer might use the tags that have less to do about the technical aspects about how the painting was produced such as “Louvre”, “Women”, and famous painting. In the future other viewers might find the Mona Lisa through one of these user generated tags because it is more relevant to them than something that the museum had though of.

Thus, by allowing museum-goers to add their own tags, museums could benefit from discovering relevant tags that would help improve the searchability of their collections.  Moreover, by allowing social tagging, museums are likely to encourage an increased sense of ownership and engagement with the museum. This in turn could help drive increased ticket or membership sales to the museum.

2) Once more museums join, “Steve Tagger” has the potential to be a tool museums could use to mine valuable information on audiences such as the age, taste, demographics and so forth. Thus, in the long run member institutions could improve their marketing initiatives through collaboration with this initiative.

3) In the future, Steve Tagger could become a popular social media site amongst museum-goers.  Thus, membership in Steve Museum could  help a museum successfully reach out to new audiences. Moreover, membership could also help encourage a deeper relationship with visitors.

For further information about this project please visit: http://www.steve.museum./