'Sup, Colin?

Sometimes a little idea brings a lot of pleasure. An example of this, which has been around since 2014 but only just passed my transom today, is Sup Bowie, a site that answers the vital question: What did David Bowie do at your age?

It does what it says on the box: you enter your name, and it shows you an event from Bowie's life.

My first thought was, of course, that this would be fun to apply to a New Zealand artist who worked steadily and productively across their lifetime - Colin McCahon, with the added advantage of the McCahon database, is the obvious option. In his 36th (approximately) year, for example, McCahon was living in Titirangi, experimenting with a new visual landscape in a Cubist-influenced style, doing some stage designs for the art gallery ballet, and producing a few rather theatrical early word paintings, like  Sacred to the memory of Death.

I thought this idea could be extrapolated out: for example, a collection search could let you call up works by various artists, based on their age (Show me all the things made by artists when they were 36). Mulling this over though, I realised this was kind of dry (and totally the kind of thing people like me come up with and get all excited about).

A creative director or UX lead might explain that the appeal of Sup Bowie is getting to use a very basic shared attribute (we were all born in some year, we were all born in some place, we are all a certain age) to draw a connection yourself and the content being delivered/marketed to you. The appeal with the Bowie site, of course, is being able to compare your life progress with a mythical unicorn beast. The reason I *like* Sup Bowie though is that instead of being programmatically driven off, say, his Wikipedia discography, each year has been specifically scripted. While some years are marked by showstoppers (his marriage to Iman, the release of Let's Dance) his childhood years are marked with imaginatively captioned photos and some years (possibly the less active, to be fair) are given to basically random shit

The what-did-Bowie-do-at-an-age-he-hasn't-reached is also dealt with ...

This brings the site closer to story telling than data visualisation. It's also more human. Mixing in a bit of humour and a bit of ordinary life make you want to keep prodding it with new numbers, precisely because it doesn't just spit out the usual biodata. And that's a useful thing to keep in mind.

Growing on me

A friend sent me a link just before Christmas to something I'd missed earlier this year - the NYT 'walkthrough' of Matisse's cut-outs at MOMA.

I'd be hesitant to call this an 'interactive' (even if they do) as there's no interaction beyond being able to horizontally scroll forwards and backwards. (I instinctively tried to click images a few times, to get zoomable versions or more information). As you move along, the info panels quietly update, in the manner of encountering a wall text as you enter a new gallery in the exhibition (I would've actually liked more of a cue that the text was updating so as to notice it more quickly - also, they're rather long on the lyricism and short on the fact).

At first, I really disliked the flattened approach. I've always enjoyed the art of laying out an exhibition in a three-dimensional space, the use of sightlines to lead you through the experience, the way works hung on intermediary walls can be part of more than one grouping. These full-frontal composite photos flatten out the viewing experience, and really do emphasise the nature of 'scrolling'. The one photo that does give you the sense of a built space instead of a flat page - above - is the weakest point in the experience. I wonder how it would (or wouldn't?) work for sculptural objects?

And yet, as I spent time with it, it grew on me. As my friend observed, it's far more enjoyable than that ghastly Google Street View zooming-around-galleries thing, which I dislike using (though I appreciate what the project's done in terms of loosening digital constraints). And I became quite fond of the intentionally unsmoothed photo composites, the places where walls and floors didn't line up.

And then I realised that fondness stems from years of enjoying encounters with Peter McLeavey's composite photos (modelled here by Robert Leonard and Jacqueline Fraser in 1986).

Points in time

The Cooper Hewitt has just released a new feature on its collection site - a timeline of significant dates in an object's history (when it was made, acquired, exhibited and digitised).

The new feature was inspired by the timeline used by the New York Public Library (scroll to the bottom of the page), but differs in two ways.

First, they use different metadata. NYPL shows the birth and death dates of the maker, along with the creation and digitisation dates for the object. Cooper Hewitt doesn't have the maker info (as far as I can tell) but includes exhibition data and more finely differentiates the method of acquisition (donation, bequest, purchase).

Second, instead of a legend, Cooper Hewitt is (characteristically) using emoji to convey the timeline events.

The screenshot above shows the emoji version of the timeline and a plain text equivalent for accessibility purposes. As Sam Brenner writes in a blog post about the new timeline

The thought process for the second issue (use of color) went like this: 

Color will be useless so we will have to use shapes as well. But then we’ll need a legend because color or shape don’t have anything to do with timeline events like “date created” or “date exhibited.” But legends are a bummer — so old media! Maybe we could use symbols instead? Maybe we could use EMOJI?!?!? 

Beyond the fact that their symbolic nature transcends the “map a color to an idea” style of legend, emojis further a second goal that we have with the collections site, which is to “avoid feeling like a database.” They allow for novelty, comfort and humor to be injected into the digital world as quickly as typing a letter on a keyboard.

I am an old person and so I prefer the text version (though once I figure all the emoji out I do see that I'll be able to scan a timeline with much more rapid understanding than the coloured diamonds of NYPL). Over all, as with the Date Graph on the V&A Spelunker, I'm enjoying the new ways that are seeping through for museums to show something of the life stories of their collections online.

Feel the heft

I've written before about Good, Form and Spectacle's indie collection discovery websites. This week they released a new 'spelunker', focused on a tiny subset of the British Museum's collection, the Waddesdon Bequest.

With under 300 objects, which are a mix of medieval and Renaissance objects and 19th century fakes, it's a delightfully contained experience. Aesthetically, it's really enjoyable to see black used as the background colour (most of the objects have been photographed against a black or very dark graduated background).

You can browse by maker, material, weight (weight! I've wanted this for ages), date, and many other facets. With such a small number of objects, the real beauty is in the way you begin to build connections between objects you see frequently, seeing them linked by the hand of a maker, their materiality, their age, or their subject matter. Groupings appear and disappear, with you developing a more rounded understanding of the pieces along the way.

They've also used their code to show size comparisons, based on the international language of the tennis ball. Beside that is a nifty interactive that lets you explore by physical location in the gallery - which would lend itself really well to use inside the building as well as online.

My favourite of these sites so far. Bravo.

Collections Online

On Friday we launched our project to put The Dowse's collection online, with a kick-off meeting with our development partner Sons & Co. It's really exciting, after years of working on interfaces for large, diverse online collections, to have a chance to work on something that's as tightly scoped (about 3,500 objects, nearly all post WWII, nearly all New Zealand) and as warm and human as our collection.

The timing was perfect, coming off the back of Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne and National Digital Forum in Wellington.  At the conference in Melbourne I was able to catch up with Mitchell Whitelaw and his work on generous interfaces; as he writes in the abstract of a recent paper

Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query.

At NDF several of us from The Dowse were able to listen to George Oates of Good, Form & Spectacle keynote 'Assumptions, Attention, Articulation' on the changes (and not-changes) between the late 2000s and today when it comes to the web, and the way we do - and could - present our collections online. George's keynote was GREAT and you should definitely take the time to watch it.



At the kick-off meeting we bounced around a lot of ideas, from hot-or-not (don't worry, it won't happen) to browse by colour, material, acquisition date, donor/lender, and emotion. We talked about other sources of information we could wrap around the objects in our collections to tell the fuller story of the artists who made them, including Wikipedia and Te Ara, and a couple of other ideas we'll keep up our sleeves for now :)

I think of what George and Mitchell do as 'alt interfaces', and although that undersells the intellectual rigour, it captures some of the sense of personality and opinion I think they bring to this work (more so than the vast majority of institutions are capable of.  I talked at the meeting about various projects by both Mitchell and George.

Mitchell's work has been about how digitised collections can be presented without the demand of the search box - the requirement that you have a research question before you can enter ...

Australian Prints and Printmaking - browse by decade

Experimental interface to the Macaulay Collection of biodiversity audio and video recording

The Nolan Explorer (commissioned by Canberra Museum and Gallery)

The Queenslander (State Library of Victoria)

George's work at Good, Form & Spectacle grows out of her work from the past seven or eight years, with Flickr, Stamen, and the Internet Archive. It has a bit more humour perhaps than Mitchell's work, and she is following a strong process of prototyping near (or close to) museums and collections.

Have a good sift around in the experiments GFNS undertook for the Wellcome Collection. This project introduced George's use of the term 'fat head' to balance the 'long tail' - the fat head is the place where adding editorial can add a lot of interest and value.

The V&A Spelunker is a guerilla interface to this massive collection. I'm crazy about the Date Graph section, which starts to give you a feel for the way the collection has grown over time.

Twoway.St, an alt interface for the British Museum collections, also makes me really happy.  Again, it gives you the beginning of an understanding of the texture of the collection, a way of browsing by travelling along the lines on which it has been assembled.

George also popped up this image in her presentation of something they're playing with - using the dimensions of objects from the collection to create sketches that indicate size, and providing a tennis ball as scale.

Finally, the delightful Small Museum project, all about 'using dumb tools bluntly', and exploring the research question What would a 21st Century cultural institution be like if it was designed today, from scratch? While not directly about online collections, you should check out the idea behind the project here and have an explore. George talks about this project extensively near the end of her NDF talk - that's the best intro.

Creating compelling collections

An interesting older article (via Mia Ridge) on 'Understanding Compelling Collections'. In it, John Coburn talks about the experiments the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums did in 2010 with sharing their collections online.

Coburn writes eloquently about facing the challenge of finding audiences and attention in social spaces. What will be compelling?

The short answer, in my view, is anything that How To Be a Retronaut would share.

The site defines itself as a time machine with ‘capsules’ of historic image collections uploaded every day. The capsules are carefully curated. They are era-specific, event-specific, moment-specific. Abandoned New York movie theatres. Mug shots of destitute Victorian criminals. 1920s Egypt in colour. Yugoslav war memorials. The last surviving witness of the Abraham Lincoln assassination.

It’s a popular site averaging 30,000 visitors a day, and over a million a month. Each capsule is generally shared a thousand times by viewers. The likely reach for each capsule is beyond calculation.

These images are the stuff museums and archives have in abundance. So neatly sidestepping the interminable question of copyright, why are many museums reaching only a fraction of this audience with our collections online.

Chris Wild of How To Be a Retronaut suggests the following “(Museums and archives should) forget about history and think about imagination. (Focus on) the images that tap into magic and the sublime. The images that disrupt people’s model of time, fracture it, break it apart. Looking at these images, viewers should encounter eternity and their own mortality”.

I agree with Coburn. I think digitisation should be promiscuous. I think people should be just flinging this stuff through the digitisers (by which I mean, whatever machine they're using) and bunging on the minimum amount of metadata, and then getting them up online. Stop agonising over the quality of your descriptions, over how to prioritise your programme, and just get the presses rolling. Digitise old stuff, so you don't have to worry about copyright so much. Take a risk and put stuff up; clearly post a take-down notice in case anyone objects. Allow people to add information to improve searchability - not squitty little tags, but proper big text fields. Even better, if you have the resource, do something like Brooklyn Museum's Posse and let QA'd contributions enter the metadata.

Making these collections compelling takes a lot of work though. When I was working at the National Library, getting our collections up on The Commons on Flickr was such a rush - so many barriers jumped in such a small amount of time. But the stuff we could share was so carefully vetted that we were (initially at least) restricted to innocuous landscapes and photos of ships - i.e., anything that didn't have people in it. We did the best with what we had, but it hurt knowing what great stuff - what magical and sublime things - we had in the collections.

Even now, I'm entranced on a regular basis. Photos of instructions for a wool-processing machine. Of awkward looking wanna-be models in the 1970s. Of a display of tire treads, or lightbulbs, or lampshades.

Or my recent obsession, photos of children from the 1870s and 1880s taken in the Whanganui studio of William James Harding. The children change, but the two rockinghorse props stay the same (I'm also beginning to suspect the beret and boater were studio props as well). And the children themselves, solemn, rarely cracking that cheeky, knowing grin of children who grew up with little cameras in the home. Often doughy, lumpen. Wearing these voluminous clothes, petticoats poking out, big black boots on their small feet. I've started a little board on Pinterest for my favourites, just to see if other people find them compelling too.

Websites websites websites

As noted at Over the Net, Hamish Keith, working with Katipo and using the Kete software, have put together a site for people to record artworks, antiques and other objects at risk in Christchurch - LostArtChch.org.nz

I'm building up towards a piece on iPhone and iPad apps for looking at art - in the meantime, have a look at the newish, heavily social/interactive artfinder site (and Jonathan Jones' review in the Guardian). Jones categorised the artfinder site as an 'online museum', a move the site's creators responded to in a blog post

There’s one thing we wanted to correct though and that is that we’re not an online museum. We’re a website. Museums are special, magical places and not all online things have to be an analogue of a real world thing. We’re proud to be a website, it’s what we always set out to be. There are points when we’ll do museum-like things. We’ll curate, juxtapose, hopefully inform, delight and convene. But these are things that websites can do too. What we hope to be is a website where related works from disparate museums can be brought together so you can find more art and artists that you love. We could spend all our time trying to replicate every minute facet of the museum experience in a virtual space, but that’s not the intention of Artfinder. The intention is to be a new way to find and collate and share the art you love and we feel the best vehicle for that is a website. There are other parts of the service that we’re working on at the moment where the best vehicle may either be an app on a smartphone, or an app on a tablet device. These won’t be analogues of museums either, they’ll be their own things, but essentially, they’ll be apps and we’ll be proud of that fact as well.

Also recentish - the Guardian's book site for children (which looks remarkably like its books section for adults, but which is aimed at 7 year-olds up to teenagers, and encourages them to write for and interact on the site). If you prefer your reviews by adults, the New York Times archive of children's book reviews is quite something.

Web muster

Crisis stations everyone. It's the end of art journalism as we know it (András Szántó, Arts Newspaper), perhaps even the end of art book publishing ( Jamie Camplin, Arts Newspaper).

The Smithsonian has gone all wikified for the creation of its Web and New Media strategy process.* I'm still a bit of a wiki sceptic, I'm afraid - mostly because I personally find them a little daunting if they're not part of my daily routine. But I do think its smart the way the homepage suggests different things you can do based on the time you have available. The YouTube channel they've set up is small but worth picking through; here's video that's been uploaded, about - of course - Twitter.



And another wiki initiative, this one from the UK National Archives. On Your Archives people can sign up and start adding to the information known about collection items by expanding catalogue entries, transcribing digitised documents, or providing research guidance.


*Surely one of those business-case words is redundant?

Modernism is bliss

The State Library of New South Wales have done a rather lovely job of digitising and presenting items from their Harry Seidler collection. A particular highlight for me is being able to leaf through a 1951 issue of Australian Home Beautiful.

Best of all, it looks like they intend to keep adding extra material over time. It would be fantastic to see the work of some New Zealand architects (or NZ-resident: the Plischke show a few years back would have lent itself magnificently to this kind of treatment) delivered in this holistic manner.

Thanks W

Sourcey

Tyler Green's post The collection catalogue is dead, long live the catalogue piqued my interest this morning. In it Green writes about the Getty's project to move from print publishing to digital publishing for public access to its collection information.

From Green's post:

The Getty's project is ambitious: It aims to replace the expensive dead-tree scholarly catalogue with an open-source, web-accessible-to-all, digital catalogue format. For now the Getty is working with eight museums on the initial stage of the project: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA.

Digital catalogues are nothing new, although the existing examples vary wildly in terms of the proportion of the collection that's available, the quality of the metadata and the usability of the interface. But the phrase in this quote that really interests me is open-source, because it indicates that the Getty will be releasing its cataloguing software for anyone to use and add to. However, while the 48-page report (note:PDF) the Getty has released contains many persuasive arguments institutions could use when trying to convince funders to stump up for online catalogues, and a lot of common sense (hey everyone - let's used standardised cataloguing terms!), it makes no mention* of the software being used or plans to release it to the wider community.

Tyler promises more info on the initiative tomorrow. The magic words I would like to see are: "the project includes releasing a public-access API'".

*Admittedly, I skim-read this and am very happy to be corrected.

The Besties: Best Online Resources (local edition)

You can't go past the Auckland Art Gallery here. While their website is starting to look a bit geriatric, I think the online collection and the digitised resources are the best in NZ.

Word on the digitisation grapevine is that the AAG will be releasing a new digital product next year, which will add wiki-style commenting to a heritage resource.

Also worthy of mention:

Christchurch Art Gallery with their growing collection of Audio on Demand.

Te Papa's new mini-exhibition sites are nice to look at, and the Zoomify is cute. At the moment though there's no sectional nav (not even breadcrumbs) and you can get foisted out unexpectedly into TP's main site, which is a bit disconcerting. And this leaves me wordless.

Co ..... operation

Last week I was at the National Digital Forum conference (more about which tomorrow) and the presentation that really interested me was by Paul Rowe from Vernon Systems, the company that provides cataloguing software to many of New Zealand's larger arts and collecting institutions.

Vernon Systems have been selected by National Services Te Paerangi to redevelop the (admittedly, currently horrendous) NZ Museums website. Currently a very basic directory, the site is going to be redeveloped into a web presence for members institutions' events, exhibitions and collection information.

The thing that really got me excited about this is that Vernon are producing a web-based version of their cataloguing system. Currently, smaller institutions without access to IT support can't afford the staff or techcosts of getting their collection information into a database that can be made publicly accessible.

The web application that Vernon is building - eHive - will allow organisations to catalogue online - the same that email services like Hotmail and Gmail allow you to email online. Organisations can sign up, then start creating records and loading up images (I think the figure of $250 a year for 5GB of files was given).

eHive will have a public and a private side. On the public side, web visitors will be able to browse the collection - like on the Auckland Art Gallery site. On the private side, organisations will be able to load up information like insurance values and condition reports.

Putting eHive behind the NZMuseums site means that people will be able to search across multiple collections at the same time (see for comparison Matapihi or CollectionsAustralia). If the big organisations that are using Vernon currently choose to import their data into eHive, it could potentially turn into an incredibly useful resource.

I think the success of the eHive system and the NZMuseums site will come down to training and standards. It's one thing to provide the technology - it's another to ensure that the Kauri Museum or Southland Art Gallery are making good digital images of their collection items, and cataloguing them in a useful (publicly and internally) way. I think the site will also need some kind of editorial control - as I understood it, there'll be the functionality to feature certain c0llections adn items on the homepage, form themed groupings, stuff like that.

I'm assuming that National Services has some sort of arrangement with Vernon whereby if the business ceases to be interested in providing the service (and hosting the files), it can all be brought in-house. But it was just really exciting to see an initative that's both about opening up access to collections for the public, and about collaborating to obtain essential services that small institutions can't otherwise access.

Newspapers - meet hyperlinks.

This morning James Fenton's Guardian article about the British Museum putting its collection database online popped up in my feed reader.

I scanned the article, noting all the good things he had to say about the project (and loving the way that the British Museum refers to the collection items listed on the database as 'flat art'. Love love love it. I am now dividing all art into 'flat art' 'not flat art' and 'art that you can't see but know is there').

Three weeks ago, the British Museum quietly launched its comprehensive website of what it calls flat art: mostly so far its enormous collection of prints and drawings. The drawings, 50,000 of them, have all been catalogued; the prints, by no means. It is hard to say how many of them there are. There is a collection of a third of a million bookplates (yet to be tackled, and perhaps a low priority). There are large untapped resources - for instance, French satirical prints - which have not been published elsewhere in any form, and will now become searchable.

The effort goes back a long way. In 1990 a team of four staff began cataloguing the drawings. It took them 10 years. At present there are on any given day eight people at work on the online catalogue, plus volunteers. What they are feeding into the system is not just the subject, author, dimensions and technical details, but also, where relevant, the scholarly literature on a given drawing, its full provenance, who gave it to the museum and when. From any entry you can then find out, for instance, what is known about the donor of the object (many of the gifts go back to the 18th century).

And then I thought yeah, I'll go to the site - where's the link? So I scrolled back to the top of the article - no link. Then back to the bottom - still no link. And then I realised that in a 1050 word article about a website, there was no link to the site. Print newspapers I can almost forgive, but this drives me crazy.

Online collection of the day

James Lilek's Matchbox Museum contains annotated digital images of 200+ matchbooks from his personal collection, selected "for their graphic design, historical value, or the sad tale you can infer by holding them between thumb and finger and listening closely."

A new matchbox is added every Monday.

War art goes online

Archives New Zealand has just released their online War Art database.

The War Art site puts the National War Art Collection of approximately 1500 works online - searchable (warning: selecting the 'advanced search' option when you're on an image record page seems to take you through to Archway, Archive's collection database), browse-able (although I wish there was an easy option to browse by artist name), tag-able (Web 2.0) and over all, elegant and interesting.




Whatever you can say about the quality of the art, this online resource is immensely useful. But the thing that I found most entrancing isn't one of the images.




On the 'What is War Art' page, Archives have loaded up two newsreel clips: 'War Artist ... Introducing Captain Peter McIntyre' and 'Artists in Uniform'. The latter is especially fantastic.

In it, Russell Clark introduces a 1944 exhibition of war art, and we are given 'candid reactions' from the crowd. But the real guts of the short clip lie in the question Clark is asked: What do New Zealanders think of artists? You've got to check it out for yourself.

Images:

Russell Clark, Assault course, Linton, c.1943-1944. Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 138. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

Peter McIntyre, Blood transfusion in desert dressing station, c.1941-1943 . Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 171. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

Allan Barns-Graham, Daily ration party, September 1943-1944. Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 92. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

BYO white gloves

I was quite excited when I first saw the Tate's 'Your Collection' feature. From the blurb:

Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it's a museum, but it's also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.

Tate has devised a new way of looking at the Displays with a range of themed 'Collections'. These suggest a number of personal journeys you could take, reflecting different moods and enthusiasms and revealing the extraordinary breadth of work on show.

The general idea of Your Collection is that you can use it to virtually curate your own selection of works from the Tate's collection. This is a feature many galleries, museums and online image databases are interested in.

The Tate's sample Your Collection collections include like 'The I'm in a Hurry' collection, and 'The Rainy Day' collection. At first I thought these were 'user-generated content' (i.e. made by visitors to the site) which had been created, submitted and posted.

Then when I had a play at forming my own selection, I discovered a few things:

1. You can only pick from about 40 images - not from the Tate's online collection
2. Your 'exhibition' must have 6 images - any less and you're sent back to the storeroom
3. You can't submit your collection, although the site will auto-generate a (heavily branded) leaflet in PDF format, and allow you to email this
4. You can only submit a generic blurb, not a comment on each work you've selected
5. The details of each work (artist, date, title) are not available.

So - despite a very slick interface, and that lovable Tate branding - the Your Collection feature is a disappointing outcome of an interesting and useful idea.

Bear with me

I know social tagging is hardly a revelation, but over the past year I've heard a lot about it in various presentations and conversations with colleagues. I'm particularly interested in the way that arts institutions are looking to tagging as a way to enhance the search functionality of their online collections. Examples of New Zealand institutions who have put their collections (or slices of them) up online include:

Auckland Art Gallery
Te Papa
Christchurch Art Gallery
Alexander Turnbull Library
Matapihi (a site that gives users access to the online collections of about 12 partner institutions).

Tagging (for people who aren't far behind me) allows users to contribute keywords to internet resources (like web pages, videos, images and blog posts) that are not controlled by a central vocabulary. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and YouTube are exponents of social tagging. The benefits of tagging include enhanced personal organisation of digital resources, spam detection, social networking and improved search functionality.

It's these last two aspects that arts institutions have jumped on. On the one hand, they're all excited about the sexy Web 2.o idea of users actively engaging with an contributing to their collections and sites. On the other hand, there's the way that tagging might / will be able to make online collections easier and more rewarding to search.

The 'problem' (not everyone's convinced that this is a problem) that tagging could fix is that the language used by curators, registrars and collection managers when cataloguing items is not necessarily the language used by the public.

For example - and not to pick on Te Papa, although god only knows why they're using rough images, not clearcut ones, on their site - when you search on the Te Papa Collections Online database using 'otago landscape' as your simple search keyword, you get this: Haru Sameshima's St Bathans, and Colin McCahon's Otago landscape no 2.

Among the artworks you don't get: Rita Angus's Central Otago and McCahon's Otago Peninsula.

The idea is that social tagging could help users to find items using keywords that aren't being used to describe the objects by the institutions. There are debates, of course, about the usefulness of user-contributed tags. People start throwing around terms like 'faceted tags'. The US Steve Museum project has just received funding to research questions like this.

Steve Museum

Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has produced a 2.0 version of their online catalogue that includes not just tagging, but Google-type features such as the 'people who searched for A also looked at X, Y and Z', all aimed to encourage 'serendipitous discovery'.

Powerhouse online collection database

Image: from del.icio.us