Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project is a collaboration of museum professionals and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access cultural heritage collections and encourage visitor engagement with collection 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 community who are interested in implementing social tagging for their own collections.
In 2008, the steve project and the New Media Consortium (NMC) were awarded a 3-year National Leadershp Grant for Advancing Digital Resource for their Steve in Action project. The goals of the project, led by Susan Chun, are to enhance the existing tagging software tools to make steve easy to use for museums of all sizes and types; to develop next-generation tagging tools that motivate and engage users, including mobile interfaces that allow tagging in museum spaces; to investigate ways to aggregate tags in order to facilitate cross-collection searching and browsing; and to demonstrate integrations of the steve tagger with commonly-used museum systems.
Representatives from museum partners for the Steve in Action project:
- Helen Abbott (Rubin Museum of Art)
- Robin Dowden (Walker Art Center)
- Diana Folsom (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
- Jonathan Furner (University of California, Los Angeles)
- Matt Morgan (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
- Peter Samis (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
- Scott Sayre (Minnesota Digital Library)
For more info, see also:
- the steve FAQ page