The data presented here is from a study using the University of Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology’s (MAA) digital museum initiative. Our experiment presented participants with the traditional museum catalog as well as an augmented catalog system that enabled the use of social tagging software, particularly using a Wordpress blog with added features of tagging and full categorical search. This augmented system is referred to as “Blobgects” in this article, and is described in the Blobgects Walkthrough (discussed in the next section). Our first concern was to test the impact that access to relatively unaltered catalog records would have on our control group. We thus investigated whether social tagging and commenting around these specialist
catalog descriptions would allow users to engage with
the catalog in sustained and satisfying ways. The promise of
social tagging is that participants can describe objects according
to categories of their own choosing, and potentially allow
the object to be referenced by a rich set of descriptors that
would be otherwise absent within the traditional museum
catalog (Chun et al., 2006; Furner et al., 2006).
This study provides a unique contribution because it
explores the relationship that objects hold not just to a single
indigenous community but across a set of “expert communities,”
and because it also, for the first time, considersWeb 2.0
technologies directly within the redesign of digital museum
catalogs. Our initial experiment, presented in the next section,
attempts to understand the interactions by which a system
like this could inspire the sharing of diverse ontologies
around objects, largely absent in traditional digital museum
and library information systems.