Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project

"Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. We are a group of volunteers, primarily from art museums, who share a common interest in improving access to our collections. We are concerned about barriers to public access to online museum information. Together, we are building open source tagging tools, collecting and analyzing tags that describe art museum collections, and engaging in discussion about how we can improve access to museum collections and foster engagement with artworks.