engaged with catalog entries for digital objects, to explore our
assertion that users engage more deeply with digital museum
objects when they are presented with diverse expert narratives.
The most interesting outcome of this study was that
the main feature of the Blobgects system, the ability to tag
and comment, had little to no effect; existing museum catalog
metadata are simply too specialized to engage diverse
publics and different “expert” communities. However, the
study also reveals the importance of issues around the roles
of narrative, dialog, and image to contextualize the objects,
independently of catalog descriptions, and the potential in
enabling users to move beyond singular, definitive accounts.
It also suggests that the manyWeb 2.0 and grassroots tools of
personalization and local description are not very useful without
these complementary means of contextualization. More
specifically, we observe the following conclusions from this
study: