Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog
The Information Society
The effects of background information and social interaction on image tagging
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Digital cultural collections in an age of reuse and remixes
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
What do you call it?: a comparison of library-created and user-created tags
Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries
User tagging for digital archives: the case of commercial keywords from the grand secretariat
ICADL'11 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Asia-pacific digital libraries: for cultural heritage, knowledge dissemination, and future creation
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This article presents an exploratory study of “Blobgects,” an experimental interface for an online museum catalog that enables social tagging and blogging activity around a set of cultural heritage objects held by a preeminent museum of anthropology and archaeology. This study attempts to understand not just whether social tagging and commenting about these objects is useful but rather whose tags and voices matter in presenting different “expert” perspectives around digital museum objects. Based on an empirical comparison between two different user groups (Canadian Inuit high-school students and museum studies students in the United States), we found that merely adding the ability to tag and comment to the museum's catalog does not sufficiently allow users to learn about or engage with the objects represented by catalog entries. Rather, the specialist language of the catalog provides too little contextualization for users to enter into the sort of dialog that proponents of Web 2.0 technologies promise. Overall, we propose a more nuanced application of Web 2.0 technologies within museums—one which provides a contextual basis that gives users a starting point for engagement and permits users to make sense of objects in relation to their own needs, uses, and understandings. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.