A Review of Subject Indexing and Social Tagging Projects in Art Museums.

Studies show that art historians and other image professionals value being able to search for images using subject terms. However, the subject indexing of artworks and images is a subjective and time-consuming undertaking. As a result, many digital image collections are lacking comprehensive subject access points at the object level. Social tagging of digital images has been proposed as a means of improving image metadata and increasing subject access to art images. Three social tagging projects, Steve.museum, the Brooklyn Museum Posse, and Art UK’s Your Paintings Tagger, were created as test programs to explore issues regarding the social tagging of digital images in museum collections. Their results suggest that carefully designed tagging programs can improve access to art images when used as a supplement to professional indexing.Master of Science in Library Scienc