wahlau's online hut

Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museum: proof of concept

by Jennifer Trant from Archives & Museum Informatics/Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. pdf obtained from here.

published in New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2006.

Summary:
This paper presents the author's work in the area of applying social tagging and folksonomy in managing information and contents found in museums. The approach implemented is called steve. The work they do here is similar to the currently known and popular social tagging sites, such as del.icio.us or conotea, but the application of the now-hot tagging technique is focused in the area of museum information. The work studies the feasibility and result of user-created/managed knowledge in a highly professional area - art and history. The tagging of paintings and artifacts aims to help visitors identifying and finding artwork they have seen. Visitors can also help each other by collectively adding tags (which are objective definitions) to the various artwork. 

note to self:
from the philosophy of steve, i must say we share the same view: what matters to the content of knowledge is not only professionally correct content. The knowledge should also relate to the knowledge users. Correctness can only be useful, when one understood it. Else, it stays in a shelf, untouched and left there to collect dust. User created knowledge can be perhaps the bridge between users and the "correct" knowledge.