Steve: A summary
steve.museum is a research project comprised of a group of volunteers, primarily from large art museums across the United States, "who share a common interest in improving access to our collections" of art on a large scale.
What people remember out an artwork often is not described in museum collections documentation and the vocabulary used by museum professionals is not always that of the general public. Curators and visitors have different ways of describing and classifying art.
steve is one attempt to develop a shared open-source tool to allow participatory classification of art by the masses. The research project is testing various implementations of the steve.tagger tool to understand how and why people tag. In some instances the art work will show up with no other information--just a blank slate for you to start tagging. Other times it will show you your tags only, some times it will show you the other tags associated with the piece already, and it will even show the museum's classification, or label, of the object. The research team is interested in finding out how these different treatments affect the "accuracy", "depth", and "quality" of tags.
There are some real potential benefits to the use of social tagging and art. For one it is cheaper than the traditional form of assigned classification. It allows you to capture what you think the piece is about in your own vernacular. It may empower you to become more involved with art. It increases accessibility to research and other collections, which is often a mandate of museum institutions.
There are some serious conflicts however, concerning authority, accuracy, and relevance. Traditional art museums and historic institutions still consider themselves the gatekeepers of knowledge. They have knowledge to share with the public. They are not traditionally fans of the pluralistic society many of us now find ourselves in. There is a lot of debate in this knowledge community between "publicly-contributed terminology" and "institutionally-authored documentation."
One thing to keep in mind, is that steve is a research project with it's own agenda. Thinking about what steve might do in the future is valuable, but overly criticizing it's features at this stage in the research plan may be a bit unfair.