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.

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The quality of metadata in a digital library is an important factor in ensuring access for end-users. Several studies have tried to define quality frameworks and assess metadata but there is little user feedback about these in the literature. As collections grow in size maintaining quality through manual methods becomes increasingly difficult for repository managers. This research presents the design and implementation of a web-based metadata analysis tool for digital repositories. The tool is built as an extension to the Greenstone3 digital library software. We present examples of the tool in use on real-world data and provide feedback from repository managers. The evidence from our studies shows that automated quality analysis tools are useful and valued service for digital libraries.

This brief position statement relates to a more sustained argument presented in published paper, available at: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2477. / This position paper presents and argument for "A Humanities Program," as a contribution to the mapping work for the arts and humanities in information science, prepared for the â Mapping Work in the Arts and Humanities: A Participatory Panel Discussionâ at ASIS&T 2008, organized by SIG-AH. Panelists: Kristin Eschenfelder (moderator and chair). Panelists: Marija Dalbello, Paul Marty, Stephen Paling (panel organizer), Scott Simon, John Walsh, Megan Winget and Lisl Zach.

The presentation was part of The 6th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Budapest, Hungary September 21, 2007 (http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2007/programme.html) / The presentation will briefly introduce a series of major principles for bringing subject terminology to the network level. A closer look at one KOS in particular, the Dewey Decimal Classification, should help to gain more insight into the perceived difficulties and potential benefits of building taxonomy services out and on top of classic large-scale vocabularies or taxonomies.

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 framewor

Annotated bibliography on information visualization for digital librarians. Focuses on overviews of information visualization, key technologies, primary sources, visualization techniques with a digital library application, and materials that are understandable without an engineering background. Some Web-based sources offer demonstration software.

This article discusses the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a National Science Foundation (NSF) project as an infrastructure or test bed for large-scale and integrated research at the intersections of digital libraries and digital learning. An aggregated evaluation service, modelled on the Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC) and an evaluation materials clearinghouse are starting points for solving the digital learning problem in digital libraries research.

The disciplinary culture theory presumes that if a scholar has been familiar with self-archiving through an existing subject-based repository, this scholar will be more enthusiastic about contributing his/her research to an institutional repository than one who has not had the experience. To test the theory, this article examines self-archiving practices of a group of physicists in both a subject repository and an institutional repository. It does not find a correlation between a disciplinary culture and self-archiving practices.

The research report from the Principal Investigator of the first IMLS funded steve.museum research project. / Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing access to on-line collections. The steve.museum research project studied tagging and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions were proposed, and methods for answering them explored. Works of art were assembled to be tagged, a tagger was deployed, and tagging encouraged. A folksonomy of 36,981 terms was gathered, comprising 11,944 terms in 31,031 term/work pairs. The analysis of the tagging of these works - and the assembled folksonomy - is reported here, and further work described. Tagging is shown to provide a significantly different vocabulary than museum documentation: 86% of tags were not found in museum documentation. The vast majority of tags - 88.2% - were assessed as Useful for searching by museum staff. Some users (46%) always contributed useful tags, while others (5.1%) never assigned a useful tag. Useful-ness increased dramatically when terms were assigned more than once. Activity for Registered Users was approximately twice that of Anonymous Users. The behaviour of individual supertaggers had far more influence on the resulting folksonomy than any interface variable. Relating tags to museum controlled-vocabularies proved problematic at best. Tagging by the public is shown to address works of art from a perspective different than that of museum documentation. User tags provide additional points of view to those in existing museums records. Within the context of art museums, user contributed tags could help reflect the breadth of approaches to works of art, and improve searching by offering access to alternative points of view. Tags offer another layer that supplements and complements the documentation provided by professional museum cataloguers.