Steve

In my opinion, every art librarian (or even artY librarian) in the world should be contributing to Steve -- and this excitement is just from reading about it. Steve is billed as "the first experiment in social tagging of museum collections." And, like page 41 of the latest Library Journal points out, it's not intended to replace, but to supplement traditional cataloging.

"Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content. . . Together, working within steve, we hope to learn more about how to improve access to museum collections. We want to explore user-contributed terminology, collected on the Web, as a way to address these gaps. User-created descriptions could provide museums with missing subject-based information for their collections databases and make our on-line resources more useful. We’re collaborating to develop a shared open-source tool that enables the collection of user terminology and facilitates its analysis.