This document discusses the use of folksonomies, or social tagging, in art museums to help users discover and explore museum collections online. It begins by explaining traditional museum taxonomies created by curators and then discusses how folksonomies emerged from social tagging on sites like Delicious and Flickr. Examples are provided of museums experimenting with social tagging interfaces, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and Indianapolis Museum of Art. The benefits of folksonomies in bridging the gap between curator and user languages are highlighted.

1. Folksonomies in
Museums
LIS 653 Knowledge Organization
Kathleen Dowling
Dana Hart
Noreen Whysel

2. Folksonomies in
Museums
Introduction
Kathleen Dowling

3. Entry Points

4. How Do Users Find This Item?
No title
No author
No knowledge of Art History

5. How Do Users Find This Item?
Campbell's Soup Cans
Andy Warhol

6. Impact of Social Tagging…
melt ape
ing landsc
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abstra
melting watch
branch watc
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face
ss
darkne
pocket
watch

7. …Improving Online Search

8. Folksonomies in
Museums
What is a Folksonomy?
Noreen Whysel

9. Folksonomy
 The user-created bottom-up
categorical structure
development with an
emergent thesaurus.
 The result of personal free
tagging of information and
objects (anything with a URL)
for one's own retrieval.
 The tagging is done in a social
environment (usually shared
and open to others).
Thomas Vander Wal
Principal and Senior Consultant,
 Folksonomy is created from
InfoCloud Solutions the act of tagging by the
Founder, person consuming the
Information Architecture Institute information.
Source: http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html, Vander Wal, Thomas (June 24, 2004).
Message posted to http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/aifia-members

10. Folksonomy
 “Mass Amateurization of Web Publishing”
“We have gone past a critical mass of connectivity between people that
has introduced a new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate
and share goods online.
“To respond to these increased informational and exchange needs,
new communication models are emerging and producing an incredible
amount of distributed information that information management
professionals, information architects, librarians and knowledge workers
at large need to link, aggregate, and organize in order to extract
knowledge.
“The issue is whether the traditional organizational schemes used so far
are suitable to address the classification needs of fast-proliferating, new
information sources or if, to achieve this goal, better aggregation and
concept matching tools are required.
“Folksonomies attempt to provide a solution to this issue, by introducing
an innovative distributed approach based on social classification.”
-Emanuele Quintarelli, Folksonomies: power to the people
 http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm

11. Folksonomy vs Taxonomy
Folksonomy Taxonomy
 Unstructured  Structured
 Personal  Hierarchical
 Free and open  Controlled
 Social  Defines relationships
folks·on·o·my [fohk-son-uh-mee] tax·on·o·my [tak-son-uh-mee]
noun,plural folks·on·o·mies. noun, plural tax·on·o·mies.
noun Computers. 1. the science or technique of classification.
a classification system derived from user- 2. a classification into ordered categories.
generated electronic tags or keywords that 3. Biology. the science dealing with the
annotate and describe online content. description, identification, naming, and
classification of organisms.
Source: Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/

12. Tagging
 Identify/Label
 Hello my name is…
 Suitcase tag
 Price tag
 Describe
 What color?
 How big?
 Who made it?
 What does it cost?

13. Tagging on the Web
 Categorize  Find
 Curator  User
 Top-Down
 Bottom-Up
 Keyword
 Category  Search term
 Directory Path  Facet
 SKU
 Re-find
 Control
 Folksonomy
 Authority Files
 Metadata Systems
 Social Bookmarking
 Controlled Vocabulary  Hashtag
 Thesaurus
 Taxonomy
 Ontology

14. Private Use vs. Public Good
Private Tag Public Tag
 Personal Recall  Group Recall
 Bookmarks (Deli.cio.us)  Blog categories
 Twitter hashtags  Formalized hashtags
 Search terms  Facets
 Language of the User  Language of the curator
Source: Weinberger, David (2007). Everything is Miscellaneous:
The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company.

15. Social Tagging: Del.icio.us

16. Social Tagging: Flickr

17. Social Tagging at Museums
 What is the best way for museum website users
to discover works online?
 What language does the average website user
use to describe an image compared to language
used by an art curator?
 Before we get to this, Dana will present on
traditional taxonomies used by museums.

18. Folksonomies in
Museums
Museum Taxonomies
Dana Hart

19. How Do Art Museums Create
Taxonomies?
 Curators determine to which curatorial
department an object belongs.
 The department further classifies the object with
appropriate descriptors.
 These descriptive terms are usually taken from a
controlled vocabulary; understanding the
vocabulary is the key to understanding the
taxonomy.

20. Authority Controls
 Controlled vocabularies are selected words or
phrases used to tag works.
 Getty is an established source of authority control
for language.
 ICONCLASS is a specialized taxonomy of art
subjects.

21. Example: British Museum
 If there is no authority control that fits a
museum’s needs, they can create their own
descriptors.
 The British Museum created their own taxonomy
that has three “top terms”: organic, inorganic,
and man-made.

22. Taxonomies: A Hierarchy
Organic Inorganic Processed Material
Man-made Natural State
Metals Synthetics
Bronze Silver Plastics Fabrics
The Victorious Athlete Charles V

23. Managing Taxonomies
 Museums purchase software that allows them to
catalog, publish and manage their collection
 IT department works with curators, data managers and
conservators to determine which data fields to
include/how to format.
 Maintenance is constant.

24. Example: The Museum System (TMS)
 The Museum System
is a collections
management software.
 TMS is open
architecture, so
collections data can be “Light box” display mode on TMS
integrated with other
management systems.

25. Taxonomies informing web galleries
 Museums use their
taxonomy and
reverse the structure
to make a more user Balance The Victorious Athlete Charles V
Dianna The West Wind
friendly “bottom up”
approach. Bronze
Marble
Processed Material

26. Pros Of Formal Taxonomies
 Taxonomies serves the needs of the museum
workers.
 Top down approach allows for strict control.
 Authority control language insures consistency with
other institutions.

27. Cons of Formal Taxonomies
 Taxonomies don’t serve the needs of
visitors/users.
 Exploring is difficult to do when trapped in a
strict classification system.
 Users who are not familiar with the authority
control terms/descriptors will have a hard time
searching for specific pieces.

28. Folksonomies in
Museums
Programmers and Social Tagging
In Museums
Kathleen Dowling

29. Bridging the Semantic Gap
 Social tagging allows users to create a path to
information using familiar search terminology.
 A social tagging interface builds a sense of
community among museum users.
 Tagging-related projects develop relationships
between museums and their communities, and
provide added value to museum collections.
 Thoroughly tested tagging projects encourage
more traffic to the museum's website and
inevitably to the museum itself.

30. Example: Cleveland Museum of Art
 Online Information retrieval tool called Help
Others Find this Object, which utilized social
tagging.
 Now in use at the Memorial Art Gallery at the
University of Rochester.
 Requires users to think of their social tags in
an organized, Taxonomic way.

31. Example: Cleveland Museum of Art
“subject:art techniques:genre scenes “
“We're looking for simple, everyday terms
that describe what you see…as well as more
complex terminology related to the work's
art historical or iconographical context. “

32. Example: AMARA
 Online collections search interface that helps art
enthusiasts who wish to explore online art
collections, but may be unable to effectively
utilize taxonomic keywords due to a lack of art
historical expertise or knowledge of art
terminology.
 AMARA helps users determine what types of art
they are seeking by answering a few simple
questions about their current beliefs and feelings.

33. Example: AMARA

34. Example: Indianapolis Museum of Art

35. User Interface
 Museums have previously been inspired by social
tagging applications such as Flickr and del.icio.us.
 Programmers need to understand how to
encourage users to continue to supply
terminology.
 Users should be able to login to a profile or
account which tracks their activities.
 Users engage in on-going relations with the institution.
 Users want to continue their work from one login
session to the next.

36. Example: steve.museum
 A social tagging system with a great deal of
variability in its interface.
 Supports individual user logins.
 Records user details, including email, for future
contact.
 Allows museum to record the 'environment' (interface
settings) within which new tags were assigned.

37. Example: Whitney for Kids
 Allows kids to collect and organize artwork in
child-friendly version of the same content
management system used by Whitney staff.
 Puts children in the shoes of the curator –
intellectually digesting the artwork and
encouraging children to assign meaning and
value to a piece.

38. Example: Whitney for Kids
“A Google
eyed dog”

39. Example: Tagasauris
 National Endowment for the Humanities Grant
was awarded to:
 The Museum of the City of New York and
 Tagasauris, a NYC technology company
 to improve the Museum's digital record
annotation capabilities with:
 open-sourced ontologies and
 crowd-sourced workers

40. The Future for Art Museum Folksonomies
 Curators need to determine how to utilize this
new folksonomy alongside their own strict
taxonomic vocabularies.
 Further explore how to engage people, keep
them engaged and foster communities of users
who share common interests (genealogists,
hobbyists, art-enthusiasts).
 Use cyber communities to build real
communities: research into creating this dynamic
will be integrated into a museum’s approach to
its public programming.

41. Bibliography
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44. Folksonomies in
Museums
Thank You!