Today we finished our long awaited ‘bulk tagging’ application.
I’d encourage you to give it a go and send us some feedback.
We are particularly interested in museum professionals and amateur collecting organisations adding tags in volume to our collection. The application currently targets the user tagging of objects in our collection that have not been formally catalogued, or whose formal cataloguing data is not visible in the online database for various reasons.
Bulk Tagger is an experimental application to give quick access to tag multiple objects in our collection database from the one webpage. One of the key problems we have identified with social tagging of our collection is that there just isn’t enough tagging going on and although the tags that are added do have significant benefit in terms of making certain collection records more easily discoverable only about 3000 records have been tagged so far.
Bulk Tagger is currently being targetted at specialist user communities as a way of rapidly increasing our pool of user tags.
We are tracking tagging behaviour and tags added via Bulk Tagger are identified as such and can be quarantined from the mass public tagging if needed in future research.
Each screen shows five objects which have not yet been tagged. Users can add multiple comma separated tags to these objects and then submit them. Upon submission, another five objects will appear. Clicking on an object thumbnail will pull up more information about the object.
This is an early release experimental product only.
Concept and programming Luke Dearnley & Sebastian Chan, Powerhouse Museum.
4 replies on “OPAC2.0 – Collection bulk tagging application launched”
I like the bulk tagger. A couple of usability issues though.
The text entry box is way too small. If you made the entry box bigger you would enourage people to enter more tags.
Also the object details window, whilst slick, is annoying – I wanted to keep it open so I could enter terms in the description into the tag box. Would be great if you could keep the window open while you tag Or tag from teh open window. This is especially important for bulk tagging where I am tagging random objects, rather than objects I know about.
Hey Seb. I like it, same response as above – the interface needs some work. It feels like an environment in which you want to dash through the objects giving your immediate responses to what they are – which is quite a nice thing. The GUI works against you for this – the images need to be way bigger (and not on-click, but there all the time) so you can see immediately what stuff is. Also changing the tab order so you can quickly jump to the next field would help things (at the moment it’s 2 tabs rather than just one). One finel thought – have you looked into not providing any description at all? Sometimes it’s a bit of a diversion…
Mike
We’re working on these fixes – thanks for the feedback. I’m thinking that maybe we should have a tabbed view which switches you between a view with description text and a view of just bigger images. Or maybe we fold away/collapse the ABOUT text.
OK folks,
I’ve fiddled with it a bit just quickly. The tag field is bigger and the behind the scenes object selection is now selecting from a larger range of objects.
Also Lucy I am not sure what you mean by not being able to keep the object details window open – because you can – you can have all five of them open at once and still enter stuff in the form fields and hit submit….
You will of course need to move them out of the way of the form fields if they are too big – do this using the MOVE handle at the top right of the pop up.