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Written by Perpetual Art Machine
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Saturday, 01 April 2006 |
One particular group that [PAM] is paying close attention to is the clever folks of steve.museum. If you're not familiar with what steve.museum is, it stands for Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement. The project deals with the issues of cataloging museum images with Folksonomic terms. Organizationally, steve.museum is made up of a consortium of museum professionals from the Guggenheim Museum, Denver Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, SFMOMA, Archives & Museum Informatics, and many more museums we're all familiar with.
In short, they are proposing a re-cataloging methodology by introducing or layering Folksonomies into what are traditionally highly rigid and specialized databases that track museum collections. The average person, perhaps even the above average person would be hard pressed to sit town at a computer terminal at one of these museums and get very far using software such as TMS - The Museum System. Considering the wealth of information and the public responsibility and charge of a museum to make their collection accessible the crux of the is situation is best described in their own words:
The Problem: Everyone who has used the web is familiar with the challenge of the empty search box. Figuring out: What did someone else call what I am searching for, may be one the most important questions that limits the use of the web as a research medium. Searching for general information is difficult enough but when searching through scholarly information such as databases of art work the task becomes even more formidable. Since the images in these databases lack the intrinsic information available in an essay, users are required to know the technical meta data terms used by trained professionals to find the information they need. To highly trained researchers these tools are an invaluable starting point for researching works in these publicly accessible collections, but for the average person searching for a work casually remembered from an exhibition or article they prove very difficult to navigate because of their reliance on scholarly knowledge as the defined characteristics"
Interesting enough, steve.museum has begun making their own software for cataloging images in museum collections. [PAM] thinks that this is incredible because this will eventually have a deep impact on our project in both the short and long term. [PAM] is always thinking of ways to improve our overall user experience as well as the longevity our database long after we become sick of making art installations.
[PAM] is encouraging all of its members to get involved, try out their prototype and participate in their discussion lists. We feel it's in everyone's best interest because inevitably some of them will end up in these museums collections. Check out http://www.steve.museum and sign up to try out the software at http://steve.thinkdesign.com/steve.php
We've contacted the steve.museum people to for a formal or informal blurb on their recent appearance at Museums on the Web 2006 which took place in late March. We plan to run a more in depth story in the following months.
Related Articles.
http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/?p=172
http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/et_main.html?page=1
http://www.swopnet.com/folksonomies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
http://www.technorati.com/tag/folksonomies
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 June 2006 )
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