nmc conversations

NMC Conversations #9
[download MP3] 23.2 Mb 20:17

Recently the NMC shared the news that we was awarded a a three-year $955,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) that provides another opportunity to partner with museums on an innovative software development project. For the grant, Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied, NMC will coordinate a project to further develop the Steve tagging application, a tool that simplifies the navigation of online museum collections by allowing viewers to tag an image with descriptive terms.

In bringing the Steve project to NMC we are excited to introduce Susan Chun as a new staff member of NMC to direct the project. We recently met in person at the NMC office in Austin, and took the face to face opportunity to welcome Susan and have her engage us in a conversation about Steve.

Susan was a founder of the Steve project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in this podcast she describes the thinking that led the Met to conceptualize the concept of tagging in 2004, before it was even really an internet buzz word. The idea grew from discussions at the museum, who had recently redesigned their web site and were finding what Susan calls a “semantic gap” for users using the search tools on the web site– they were struggling to find things, because museum visitors tended to look for terms based on iconography (”dog”, “hat”), color, emotion, which did not match the more technical language used by the museum to document the digitized art works. They decided the best way to find the best terms people would use to search for– was to ask them to provide the keywords, or “cataloging by crowd.”

The MET did many experiments with paper prototypes, which were successful enough to generate interest in developing software to provide this functionality. But they realized that even a large museum like the Met did not have the resources to develop it, so they reached out to their colleagues at other museums, and started Steve as a volunteer project in 2005 followed by a successful IMLS grant in 2006 to conduct research on the first version of the tool to find what would be best set of features to provide for public tagging.

Susan shared that the name of the project and software is not a person or an acronym - “Steve” was chosen as something to represent a person that was friendly, memorable, and non-threatening.

The new project with NMC will be to develop the next version of what is already a successful tool; the software is and will be available as opensource. The “new” Steve will provide tools that are applicable not to just art museums or libraries but any organization that has information that needs to described, found, and understood– a goal of the new project is to define ways to use tags from across many disciplines and collection types. In addition, there will be development in how tags can be used to provide multilingual access to collections.

Part of the project will also be to investigate new interfaces for tagging- going beyond typing text in a box– for other ways to capture social tagging, such as non textual tags, emotion sliders, and the uses of mobile devices for tagging.

Leadership in the technical aspects of the project will come from the developers at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (MA) who were part of the first Steve software project. The project starts in early December bringing together representatives from many museums such as the IMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, the Rubin Museum of Art,a number of the Texas art museums who participated in the NMC’s Marcus Project, and extending beyond art museums to the Minnesota Digital Library Coalition and science museums such as the Exploratorium.

At this meeting, technical and non-technical participants will participate in a software requirements process where they will describe user personas and scenarios of how they interact with the new software, and the software requirements will be pulled out of these stories.

We at the NMC are very excited about working with Susan and her colleagues, and you cna count on hearing a lot more about Steve and social tagging as the project unfolds.