Even before there were #hashtags, ‘social tagging’ was created to add different perspectives to metadata (descriptions) of digital stuff. Tagging allows people to associate related images, books, or sites based on their personal use/needs/perspective.
Folksonomies, sets of user tags, have changed the way we interact with the web:
http://bit.ly/credo-folksonomy
A U.S. National Archives project asking people for descriptive tags to digital content in their catalog—and transcribing historical documents for all to read & search.
https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist
Museums have been allowing social tagging in their online collections to add access points and to allow users to curate their own lists of favorite stuff.
http://bit.ly/museum-tagging-blog
Dr. Jaime Cantrell discusses “introducing undergraduate students to the importance of archival research and materials by encouraging them to become citizen transcribers for the National Archives as part of their coursework.”
https://education.blogs.archives.gov/2017/02/09/teaching-from-archives/
A roundup of how crowdsourcing is being used in cultural institutions for transcription, supplementing metadata (tagging), and Collection Building & Curation
http://bit.ly/educause-engagement
The steve.museum project helped art museums implement tagging “as a means of enhancing access to on-line collections” & studied “the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation.”
http://hdl.handle.net/10150/105627
Check out the list of social tags added to the Phila. Museum of Art & add yours.
https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/socialTagging.html
A bunch of fun metadata game projects created with this open source framework gamify tagging, transcription and description-- crowdsourcing fun!
http://www.metadatagames.org/