NMC Awarded $955,000 National Leadership Grant from IMLS

The New Media Consortium has been awarded a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) in the amount of $955,000. The grant will fund Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied, a project to further develop the Steve tagging application, a tool that simplifies the navigation of online museum collections by allowing viewers to tag an image with descriptive terms.

The NMC and several museum partners, inlcuding the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Denver Art Museum, will apply research learned from the first iteration of the Steve Project to develop enhanced tools to make Steve more accessible to a broader variety of institutions and people. The Minnesota Digital Library Coalition, the MINITEX Library Information Network, and a number of small to mid-sized museums will also participate in the project.

"Social tagging tools are likely to have significant benefits for cultural heritage professionals as well as the general public, especially if they are implemented and adopted on a broad basis," notes Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of NMC and the project’s lead and principal investigator. "Previous work by the Steve project team found that visitors and professionals use very different terms to tag the same pieces. This grant will support continued research and development into social tagging and aims to further illuminate the potential applications of tagging for museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions."

To support and encourage mainstream adoption of social tagging tools by cultural heritage organizations of all sizes and types, the Steve team will enhance the software tools developed for the original research project; develop, implement, evaluate, and document multiple models for adopting social tagging; demonstrate integrations with major information management systems; and continue to galvanize discussion within the community about the strengths and weaknesses of tagging as a method for communicating with audiences. At the end of the three-year grant period, a variety of tagging environments will have been implemented and evaluated with at least thirty partners, testing the applicability of the Steve tools to a variety of collection types.

The project will begin in October, 2008 and conclude in October, 2011.

For more information about the grant, please see the IMLS Press Release.

Download the NMC Press Release (PDF, 52k).