Newfields

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will conduct research on the capabilities of social tagging and folksonomies, methods of labeling and categorizing online collections to make objects easier for the public to find.. There are millions of works on the Web, but the general public sometimes has difficulty finding them because the keywords associated with them may be technical or professional terms. This project will evaluate the relationship of user-suggested terms to existing museum documentation, professional-controlled vocabularies, general reference resources, and terms used in searches of on-line museums resources by the public. The results will provide new strategies for subject description and indexing and increase public access to collections using a set of common terms that takes into account the varied perspectives of users. The Met will collaborate with six other museums on this project: Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Rubin Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.