Between Commodification and Engagement: On the Double-Edged Impact of User-Generated Metadata within the Cultural Heritage Sector (original) (raw)
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Metadata helps users locate resources that meet their specific needs. But metadata also helps us to understand the data we find and helps us to evaluate what we should spend our time on. Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontextualize the content and metadata created by LAMs. Many cultural heritage institutions are interested in gaining a better understanding of social metadata and also learning how to best utilize their users' expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata and improve their users' experiences. In the first report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Musems, Part 1: Site Reviews, the 21-member RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group reviewed 76 sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums that supported such social media features as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. In this second report, we analyzed the results from a survey of site managers conducted in October-November 2009. Forty percent of the responses came from outside the United States. The survey focused on the motivations for creating a site, moderation policies, staffing and site management, technologies used, and criteria for assessing success. In our upcoming third report, we provide recommendations on social metadata features most relevant to libraries, archives, and museums as well as the factors contributing to success.
Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives and Museums
2011
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User-generated metadata in cultural heritage database
The changing role of the user, that gradually shifts from a passive consumer of information towards a pro-active user that reorganises and manipulates data, has an increasing impact on traditional information retrieval. A multitude of practical and methodic questions rise as popular web-applications such as blogs, RSS and social bookmarking tools allow users to create and share metadata about online resources. This article tackles these issues in the particular domain of visual cultural heritage. Online image databases increasingly offer users possibilities to annotate and comment on images of interest to them. But what is the pertinence of these user contributions? How can their quality be evaluated? Concretely, our article starts with an introduction to the phenomenon of usergenerated metadata by presenting the social tagging of cultural heritage images and the practice of publishing users comments. Secondly, a case study presents an analysis of users comments within the image database of the National Archives of the Netherlands. Based on these empirical data, conclusions and generalizations outside our specific case study are formulated.
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
New technologies have revolutionized the world: nowadays we can communicate instantly to almost everywhere in the world with just a click from our cell phones or laptops. These technologies have also stormed the cultural heritage fi eld, causing major changes in how institutions, stakeholders and communities approach their heritage. From taking part directly on the restoration process to social tagging, in this paper I will analyze how social media and cultural institutions have become deeply interconnected.
Journal of New Media and Mass Communication, 2015
The gradual inclusion of the participation of the public in museums through social networks and other tools that enhance the user's leadership in the management of information and in the knowledge production seems to have led to an evolution in the cultural experience of the public. However, we do not know yet whether the possibility to intervene and manipulate the content really optimize the communication between visitors widening their possibilities of action turning them into a concerned and active audience. In this study, we have analyzed practices and motivations of on line audience, detecting some guidelines that should be considered when incorporating user participation in heritage institutions. The analysis of when a participatory environment can encourage the dissemination of the contents of the museum and engage audiences in an ongoing and repeated relationship that encompasses even the attendance realm, was performed using a qualitative methodological perspective though supported by some quantitative data related to the profiles of the recipients of cultural activities and their practices in the network. The suggestions proposed, by virtue of being the result of an evaluation process of public preferences, would highlight the real needs of on line visitors and reduce the dissociation between the way that museums seek to use their pages and effective practices of their users. Looking at these results, this research (based on the analysis of four case studies) represents an attempt to approach the strategies adopted by the institutional sphere in relation to the new social media and to the current needs of the public.