steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project is an open collaboration between museum professionals, members of the academic community, software developers and others who believe that social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access museum collections and encourage visitor engagement with works of art. The project team has embarked on a rigorous program of research into how social tagging can best serve the museum community and its visitors. To support our research, the team is developing a suite of open-source tagging tools; these have been made freely available and the cultural heritage community has been encouraged to use them to introduce tagging on their institutional websites or within their institutions.

steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project was founded in 2005 to address concerns by art museums about access to their ever-growing online collections. As museums were welcoming increasing numbers of visitors to their online outposts, they were also discovering that these visitors struggled to navigate digital collections. The problem, in part, stemmed from a semantic gap that separated museums' formal descriptions of works - usually created by art historians or other specialists - and the vernacular language used by the general public for searching. This language, reflecting the broad range of needs and perspectives of users, simply did not exist in collection documentation. Project team members believed that by employing the thenemerging technology of social tagging and its resulting folksonomies we might bridge the semantic gap by engaging users in the time-consuming and expensive task of describing our collections, add a multi-cultural, perhaps multi-lingual perspective to our documentation, and possibly even develop strategies for engaging new types of users in looking at and thinking about art. We were also intrigued by the potential of the medium to expose our professional staff - curators, educators and others - to direct evidence of how works of art in our collections were perceived by visitors.

In 2005, a professional forum at the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver, Canada, served as a planning meeting for the project that would become steve. The Forum, chaired by Susan Chun and Michael Jenkins of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), was entitled "Cataloging by Crowd: A proposal for the development of a community cataloguing tool to capture subject information for images." In 2006, based on the project's proof-of-concept research, research agenda and prototype tool development work, as well as on the commitment of a number of partners to the project's work, the US Institute of Museum and Library Services provided Steve with two years of funding. The final results of the research project will be published in late 2008.