Andrew Lewis Senior Web Content Manager, Victoria and Albert Museum

Mixing It Up:

Developing and implementing an in-housetagging system for a content-rich website

Museums and the Web7 April 2011

Linked In http://bit.ly/hOpANF

Andrew Lewis

Senior Web Content Manager at the Victoria and Albert Museum London, since 2008

Responsible for team managing content on website

Information science training with public library electronic services background

This session is hoping to give you…

A greater understanding of what

tagging can do and how that might

be useful for you.

Format of this session

Background - what we were trying to

do, and how we approached it

An audience exercise in tagging...

This session discusses

Brief background to V&A website

redevelopment

Attempts to cross-connect visitors with

content they might not realise we have

Developing a tagging system for simple

subject classification

The human issues around tagging

content

Background - redeveloping the V&A website

Rationale

– To improve site visually (easy bit)

– To move to organisation by user’s interests not by internal departmental structure

– To update site to be responsive to typical googling/social-recommendation behaviour of web users

– Move towards open source and integration of user-generated content and web social media

Current website…

beta.vam.ac.uk

Hierarchies

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9

Hierarchies

beta.vam.ac.uk

Hierarchies

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help

But…But...

How do visitors land on our website?

Source: Google Analytics for V&A site: 1 January – 31 December 2010

Clustering around users’ subjects of interest

How do visitors land on our website?

Source: Google Analytics for V&A site: 1 January – 31 December 2010

How do visitors land on our website?

3 levels of control…

3 levels of control

Editorial – ability to specify an article must appear under a subject cluster

Semi-automatic – ability to define the key subject of the article or subject cluster as the basis for clustering content

Automatic – search logic analyses the terms in the content and uses algorithms to match it with other content

Editorially selected content

Automatic and semi-automatic

Automatic and semi-automatic

Automatic and semi-automatic

Tagging…

6 tagging fields...

1. “person” to reflect that visitors would be looking for information about specific artists, designers, historical and fictional figures

2. “place” to reflect visitors interest in art and design associated with particular locations

3. “technique” to support visitors trying to understand artistic and design processes

4. “period/style” to reflect an interest in artistic movements or significant named historical periods

5. “date” to reflect that visitors may be interested in work produced at a particular point in history

6. “free text” – this was included to allow flexibility and be able to employ terms not covered by the more specific categories

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A lot of spreadsheets...

Scale…

The process of tagging content

– Audit revealed over 4,000 pages on the main site

– Tagged individually by reading the page and deciding the main subject(s)

– Possible subject clusters noted at the same time

– At the time, staff could not see the effect of tagging, as system was not built

– Rules developed as a group exercise with daily feedback and discussion as tagging progressed

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Identifying clusters...

Your turn…

Opera tagging

http://beta.vam.ac.uk/page/m/membership

http://beta.vam.ac.uk/page/k/kimono

Things to take away...

Tagging offers a pragmatic method for aggregation without cumbersome schemas

It is labour intensive

Classification is not as simple as it appears. Tagging needs balance between accuracy and “good enough”

Tagging is very subjective

People assign importance according to their knowledge of a subject

Developing tagging without seeing the results creates anxiety

Andrew Lewis

http://beta.vam.ac.uk

Thank you

Museums and the Web7 April 2011

Linked In: http://bit.ly/hOpANF

email: a.lewis@vam.ac.uk