steve.museum announces new functionality and a Facebook application

Hi everyone,

I wanted to alert you to some new functionality offered by the steve social tagging project, and to ask for your help in recruiting your friends and classmates to tag art using the new steve Facebook application. You are now able to email invitations to tag art to friends, share your favorite images or tags, and display works from the steve tagger on your Facebook profiles. We also encourage you to join the steve Facebook group--it's a handy way to hear about new developments on the project. The formal announcement of our new tools, and an invitation to participate, follows.

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Steve.museum is a collaboration of art museums that is studying the potential of social tagging (user-contributed descriptions) to improve access to online art collections. Our research is conducted online, where visitors are invited to look at and tag works of art from the collections of U.S. and U.K. museums. The project has recently added some new functionality to its tagging tools, allowing users to share their favorite images and tags with others, invite friends to participate, and—for those with Facebook accounts—to display their tagged works on their Facebook profile pages and to see the most popular tagged artworks.

We invite you to check out our new features by visiting the steve website or by trying out the Facebook application. Our research depends on you to tag artworks, and to invite your friends and contacts to participate as well.

You’ll find the steve tagger online at http://tagger.steve.museum. If you have not tagged previously, you’ll have the option to create an account. Doing so is not mandatory, but registering does help us to collect more useful information for our research.

The steve Facebook application (steve Art Tagger) can be accessed at http://apps.facebook.com/steve-museum/. When you install the application, you’ll have the opportunity to link your Facebook account to a previously-created steve account.

Please note that if you would like to explore both the steve tagger at tagger.steve.museum and the Facebook application, you’ll need to close your browser between sessions to avoid conflicts that may cause errors. Also, the choice to link your steve account with Facebook is persistent: steve will remember you as a Facebook user in the future.

More about the project: You can learn more about the steve project by visiting our project website at www.steve.museum. Museums contributing images to the current research project include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.