Subject matter categorization of tags applied to digital images from art museums

In recent years, cultural heritage institutions have increasingly used social tagging. To better understand the nature of these tags, we analyzed tags assigned to a collection of 100 images of art (provided by the steve.museum project) using subject matter categorization. Our results show that the majority of tags describe the people and objects in the image and are generic in nature. This contradicts prior subject matter analyses of queries, tags, and index terms of other image collections, suggesting that the nature of social tags largely depends on the type of collection and on user needs. This insight may help cultural heritage institutions improve their management and use of tags.