Steve is a collaboration of museum professionals and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access museum collections and encourage visitor enagement with museum objects. Our activities include researching social tagging and museum collections; developing open source software tools for tagging collections and managing tags; and engaging in discussion and outreach with members of the museum community who are interested in implementing social tagging for their own collections.

Steve as Research

The project team is engaged in systematic research into how social tagging can best serve the museum community and its visitors. The research is currently funded, in part, by a National Leadership Grant from theU.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. Data collected at http://tagger.steve.museum provides a testbed for researching our hypotheses about social tagging. 

Steve as Software

To support our research, the steve team has developed a suite of open source tagging tools. The steve tagger tool is available for download at the project's SourceForge site, and members of the community are encouraged to download and install the tool. At its core, the tagger is a php web application that can publish a basic online collection and record tags. The project has issued a rich API that allows the integration of the tagger tool with existing projects and supports new development efforts. By itself, tagging is not technically difficult, but it is our intention to provide a easily-deployed common platform to allow users to share the costs of future tool development.

Steve in Action 

The steve tagger has been implemented in a number of places in a variety of ways. The "Steve in Action" section of the site showcases some of the deployments of the steve tagger software, and provides links and case studies. More information about steve tagger deployments can be found in the "Steve in Action" Forum, where prospective adopters of the software can talk to colleagues who have already implemented the steve tools about how they use the software.

About Steve 

The site's FAQs answer your questions about who we are, how to contact us, and how you can participate in our work.