museumsandtheweb.com - research

New paper online about convergence and professional education in archives, museums and libraries

jtrant — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:55:52 +0000

Emerging Convergence? Thoughts on museums, archives, libraries and professional training

J. Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics
[author's pre-print of article to appear in Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol. 24, no. 4, Dec. 2009.]

Museum jobs: a summary

jtrant — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:32:21 +0000

when talking to some of the developers at the Fluid Engage project team meeting today (i'm on the Advisory Committee), i realised that an introduction to the way that museums are organized, and what kinds of people do which kinds of jobs, would be helpful.

Impact of Museum Websites - a comparison using Alexa

dbear — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:47:35 +0000

NOTE: This was an experiment, meant to test the method, not to produce a citable result. Read the comments.

The other day I was musing about what impact museums are having on the Web and who is 'punching above their weight'? I began to ask how would we know, and it occured to me to check the relative Alexa rankings of museums (http://www.alexa.com/). This produced a few possible answers and lots of surprises, so I systematically looked through the rankings to find the (c. 200) 'museums' that ranked, by traffic, in the top 500,000 web sites worldwide. I included www.archimuse.com for comparison and amusement (which, if it was a museums, would have ranked 99 among museums).

22nd International Sculpture Conference: CALL FOR PAPERS

International Sculpture Center — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:47:45 +0000

22nd International Sculpture Conference: CALL FOR PAPERS

London, UK – April 2010

Survey on Computer Exhibits in Museums

jspadaccini — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:26:08 +0000

Everyone,

We are resubmitting a grant proposal to fund Open Exhibits, a project that will allow us to develop, test, and disseminate open source software built specifically for museum exhibits.

Muriel Cooper: designer of the information landscape

jtrant — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:24:53 +0000

deep in the midst of production deadlines for MW2009, i'm celebrating Ada Lovelace day by remembering Muriel Cooper, co-founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop. a pioneer in thinking about – and visually representing – information space, Cooper's insistence that information had characteristics beyond the linear was of significant influence on me as i worked with the Art Information Task Force, structuring the Categories for the Description of Works of Art in the early 1990s.

Museums and the Web: Current Issues

jtrant — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 12:53:40 +0000

the slides from my presentation yesterday at Keio University, Tokyo, are on-line now, at slideshare [and embedded below]. Thanks to everyone who responded to my query about what keeps you up at night.

/jt

New Pew Stats: American Adults and Social Networks

jtrant — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:33:34 +0000

There's a new update out from the Pew Internet and American Life Project about "Adults and Social Network Sites". See the summary at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/272/report_display.asp and download the report from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf

New Grant Competition: Digging Into Data Challenge

jtrant — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:56:33 +0000

A new grant opportunity for projects exploring large-scale data analysis has been announced, supporting collaborative research in Canada, the US and the UK that makes use of large data sets.

From their Web site:

New Article: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research

jtrant — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:32:05 +0000

Abstract

Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing the indexing of online collections. This paper examines the state of the art in tagging within museums and introduces the steve.museum research project, and its study of tagging behaviour and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions are proposed and methods for answering them discussed. Experiments implemented in the steve.museum research collaboration are discussed, preliminary results suggested, and further
work described.

J Trant. Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research, Journal of Digital Information, Vol 10, No 1 (2009) available at : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/270/277

New Article: Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework

jtrant — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:25:05 +0000

Abstract

This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical frameworks).

J Trant, Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework, Journal of Digital Information, Vol 10, No 1 (2009) available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/269/278

LC Flickr Commons Report Available

jtrant — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:33:11 +0000

the Library of Congress has made a detailed report of their experiments with the Flickr Commons available on their web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html

They note the following in their summary:

there's no such thing as 'museum content'

jtrant — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:37:30 +0000

There's a sentence from the Museums and the Web 2008 Proceedings that keeps coming back to me, as i think about things as wide-ranging as tag analysis for steve.museum, and the nature of professional training in museums, archives and libraries.

When discussing the use of museum-materials posted on YouTube a group of museum professionals noted that “the people watching this were not searching for ‘museum’ content; they were searching for "calligraphy" content” (Alexander et al., 2008).

upcoming presentation: steve.museum research results @ mcn

jtrant — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:35:10 +0000

as principal investigator of the steve.museum IMLS research grant, wrapping up this december, i'll be presenting further results from our tagging study at the upcoming museum computer network conference:

Friday November 14, 2008
Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC

Should You Care about Social Tagging? – Findings and Recommendations from steve.museum

tagging and folksonomy keynote @ DC2008

jtrant — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:39:58 +0000

i gave a keynote this morning at the Dublin Core Metadata Meeting - DC2008 on access to art museums on-line: a role for social tagging and folksonomy? that reports on more of the steve.museum tagging data analysis. this talk built on what i reported at NKOS last week [steve.museum: public and professional vocabularies. presentation @ NKOS 2008] and extended it to include some thoughts on user-generated metadata – useful in the context of DC, which began its life as a format for encoding user-created metadata – and a bit of work about the relationships between tags and search logs.

my slides are here (without some of the funky builds).

while we'd hypothesized that there might be a tight relationship between tags and search terms, what we found was a much looser coupling. whether this is a self-fulilling prophesy – because searches on the kinds of subject and genre terms that they use to tag fail, people don't use them – or because description and retrieval vocabularies vary at some other level still needs some thought. that's what the examples we looked at seemed to indicate, and a place i'll be looking further.

steve.museum: public and professional vocabularies. presentation @ NKOS 2008

jtrant — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:50:15 +0000

David and i presented the first of the steve.museum research results at the NKOS workshop today. the [many] slides are attached to this post. the take aways, though, can be easily summarized:

85%+ of tags are not found in museum documentation
60%+ tags don't match vocabularies [and those that do match ambiguously]
most tags can't be mined from other sources [like published catalogues or other scholarly works]

Public tagging vocabulary is different from the vocabulary in museum professional documentation. So tagging does contribute.

Contribute to what? well, we still need to look further into the details, particularly the relationships between tags and search terms to talk about that with more confidence. Watch for that from the Dublin Core (DC2008) meeting next week.

upcoming presentations on tagging and art museums

jtrant — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:47:39 +0000

the fall travel season is starting up again, and we're in Europe this week and next presenting research results from the steve.museum project. watch for the following:

Public and professional vocabularies: comparing user tagging with museum documents and documentation

The 7th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the 12th ECDL Conference, Aarhus, Denmark
Friday September 19th 2008 [see the program on-line]

David and i will be talking about the differences between public tagging vocabularies and the language of art cataloguing and curators.

and

steve.museum: tagging art. research and results

International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Berlin, Germany
Tuesday 23 September 2008 [see the program on-line]

i'm keynoting DC2008 – talking about the role of tagging in retrieval-focused museum metadata.

We're are looking forward to catching up with old friends, and – of course – i'll be posting notes and thoughts as we go.

New study on factors that improve online experiences

ngamble — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:46:31 +0000

IDEA, the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement, just released “Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences,” which reports the findings of a study that the California-based nonprofit organization conducted recently.

Museums and the Web Benchmarking Survey: Time for an Update

jtrant — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:05:16 +0000

Some time ago – in 2005 – Archives & Museum Informatics launched a survey of museum web activities. We noted then that:

Each financial cycle museum Webmasters struggle
to justify their budget requests. Whenever statistical reports are
circulated someone asks, "How do we compare?" When exploring the
benefits of a new function, Web teams ask themselves "Is it worth the
investment?" Answers to these questions are hard to come by.

[see http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/index.html for the full background]

This survey – the results of which are written up at http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/report/mwbenchmarks2005.html – was designed to help fill some of the voids in our knowledge. As a first stab at the problem we realise that it wasn't perfect. And things have changed since 2005!

We've been asked to update the survey for a client-group of museums, and thought we'd use the opportunity to ask for input from the community as well. If we're going to launch it again more broadly, we'd like it to be useful to you ...

So, please, take a look at the questions – available as a PDF from http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/MW-Survey05.pdf – and post your thoughts on revisions or additional questions here.

IEEE IS Special Issue on on AI and Cultural Heritage

laroyo — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:43:00 +0000

IEEE Intelligent Systems
Special issue on AI and Cultural Heritage

http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/intelligent/content/CulHerCFP.html

steve.museum wins honorary mention at PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA

jtrant — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:38:42 +0000

The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

Slidecast of Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags

smannion — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:46:59 +0000

For those who are interested in social tagging, or who might have missed the Community Engagement session at MW2008, I have uploaded my slides "Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags" along with audio track to Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/s.mannion/seeing-tibetan-art-through-social-tags/

steve.museum announces facebook application: tag art in your profile

jtrant — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:55:33 +0000

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

share images and tags
invite others to participate, and
display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.

What are the [core] functions of a museum web site?

jtrant — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:08:43 +0000

david and i are completing an article for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science .... it's got me wondering about what the 'general, intelligent reader' might want to know about museums and the web.

i'm thinking we need to answer the following questions:

Game-Based Learning Workshop Links

Steve Allison-Bunnel — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:33:10 +0000

Here are some links to things we mentioned in the workshop today:

NYT article on museums in social network spaces

jtrant — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:53:31 +0000

There's an article in the Museums Section of the New York Times yesterday about museums activities in social network spaces. it was my conversation with Dan Frost (the frelance reporter who wrote the piece) that sparked my recent blog postings about the subject. Dan's piece is a good intro ... and there are a lot of Museums and the Web papers about the subject this year, and in past years [search the bibliography].

Killer Statue — Psyched About the Site!

steve.museum term review: lots of useful tags

jtrant — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:12:07 +0000

At the steve.museum session at MCN we devoted a significant amount of time to "Term Review" –– what we're calling the qualitative study of tags by professionals from participating museums within the context of the steve.museum research project. It fed really nicely into a discussion at the project team research meeting post-MCN.

For some, the very possibility that tags contributed by taggers of works of art might be reviewed by museums is antithetical to the ethos of user tagging. But, within the context of steve.museum it's essential for developing our understanding of the contribution that tagging and folksonomy might make to the accessibility of works of art on-line.

How, for example, can we respond to our colleagues' concern that tags will be inaccurate | misleading | misspelled | mis-guided, if we don't look at them and see if they are? How can we say that they might be useful, if we haven't looked?

Social Tagging and Access to Collections: podcast + some followup thoughts

jtrant — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:49:36 +0000

i was supposed to be in Brazil this morning, talking about "Social Tagging and Access to Collections". unfortunately, visa problems made that trip impossible. the presentation was made via podcast; i've put the files on-line.

it's an introduction to the issues that we're exploring in the steve.museum project – how social tagging might enable access to art collections – focusing on the gap between user interests (as we know them from queries and reference questions) and museum documentation as created by and for professionals. This work is more formally presented in other steve papers (see below).

that gap exists partially because our documentation standards are theoretical; designed by and for professionals to serve museum functions. i've participated in many initiatives that explored aspects of access to collections – CHIN, FDA, AITF/CDWA, CIDOC, MESL, AMICO – winner take all in the aconymble contest – and don't dispute this as a valid first premise. it's a place we had to start from, but it may not put us in a good position to support public access.

museum data is still seldom shared beyond the bounds of local systems; and when it is, in early cases like MESL or building The AMICO Library, we discover that institutions adapt standards, rather than adopting them. merging data from disparate sources is hard. we compromise on what has to be merged and end up with thin (lowest common denominator) descriptions that may not be adequate for differentiation between similar objects, and may not support user needs.

i'm more convinced, since the discussion with seb and mike about the contribution of tags, that we need to look at the types of terms we're getting as tags and the types of terms searched, when we build on my preliminary analysis of Guggenheim search logs as part of the steve.museum term analysis.

that way, we'll be able to learn a bit more about the relationship between tag, searches, and documentation structures, and do it within the context of searchers' needs.

user contributed content @ the Whitney

jtrant — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:05:53 +0000

The New York Times has published some great photographs of artist Rudolf Stingel's installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. to accompany a brief piece by Roberta Smith.

With the gallery walls themselves as canvas, visitors have been asked to complete the work done at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, whose work comprises the upper level of the piece.

The result is a definite contrast to the white cube.

/jt

steve.museum paper for ichim07

jtrant — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:10:02 +0000

we've just released the steve.museum paper that provides background to the demonstration Susan Chun will be giving at ICHIM07. it begins to present the methods for steve.museum's IMLS-funded national leadership grant (research), focussing on our data collection strategy and the steve tagger.

it also includes some preliminary results about attitudes to tagging amongst museum staff, and early analyses of tags collected. Early results in prototype tests are holding up. We're seeing a greater than 75% new tag rate:

"Of the tags assigned to all works during Term Set 1 (March 27– July 11, 2007), 76.5% (7,973 of 10,418) were not found in museum documentation." (Trant 2007)

That means that, during our first phase of data collection, more than three-quarters of the tags assigned in the steve tagger were not found in the museum's own documentation for those works.

/jt

Trant (2007). Trant, J., et al., The eye of the beholder: steve.museum and social tagging of museum collections

, in International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM07): Proceedings, J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. 2007. Published September 30, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/trant/trant.html