Several art museums around the country are starting to give users the ability to enhance their websites in a manner similar to that used by flickr, LibraryThing, and del.icio.us...

“Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we’re hiding the content away from nonspecialists,” said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.”

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” for example, could elicit tags like “stars,” “planets,” “swirls” or “insanity.”

The museums that are experimenting with tags include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This follows the introduction of tags to several several library catalogs around the country, including those at the University of Pennsylvania and Ann Arbor District Library.

Amazon.com added tags awhile back, but users have yet to warm up to that site's tagging scheme. LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding performed a statistical comparison of the difference in success levels for tags on his site and on Amazon a few weeks ago...

Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing ahttp://www.librarylaws.org/node/add/blog
Submit Blog entry | Library Lawsppears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon—13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)

Something is going on here—something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.

Read Tim's complete post here.

[New York Times] One Picture, 1,000 Tags