Collaborative tagging of art digital libraries: Who should be tagging? A case study

Abstract

Collaborative tagging is attracting a growing community in the arts museums as manifested by several initiatives such as the Steve Museum project and the Posse initiative at the Brooklyn Museum. The driving force for these projects is the quest for increased and improved access to artifact collections such as art collections. Previous results of studying the nature of tags provided by users reveal that these tags have little overlap with museum documentation; but on the other hand, there is good overlapping with terms from vocabulary sources such as the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). This paper reports a case study that we performed where the aim was to include tags provided by "average" users from the broader community, not necessarily closely related to the art field as it was the focus of the previous studies. The study we performed comparing tags generated by average users, expert users and metadata seems to indicate the unique role that tags provided by average users would play in facilitating the interaction with art digital libraries. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.