Exploring the Usability of Folksonomies in the Online Art Museum Community

摘要

This paper presents a usability evaluation of the Indianapolis Museum of Art website - as a typical art museum website supporting both tag-based search and user tagging of artwork - in an effort to explore how users access artwork while interacting with the museum online search and retrieval system. The usability study examined the extent of usage of Steve Tagger capabilities (annotation and use of tags in the process of searching/accessing artwork resources) deployed on the website. The usability test results showed that 55% of the users were able to successfully locate information on the website using both traditional searching techniques and folksonomies. However, only 34% of the users were able to successfully locate artwork using tags only. On the other hand, 95% of the participants were able to annotate an object by adding a term or tag to describe the artwork.