Strengthening digital engagement to provide intersectional narratives within museums using user generated metadata: a case study at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and the applications beyond.

Cultural heritage institutions have experienced a technological boom over the last fifty years,
and digital access to collections has evolved from searchable catalogues available onsite with
the aid of a research staff member, to a variety of modalities ranging from web-based, publicly
available databases to interaction through social media platforms. As institutions look to
capitalize on the new ways in which their collections are being discovered, cataloguing visual
data and expanding metadata are necessary for staying relevant, on trend, and engaged with
audiences. Metadata allows people to perform various operations with data, including
searching, managing, structuring, preserving, and authenticating resources. Creating metadata
is a labor intensive process, and one solution to the need for more extensive cataloguing is
crowdsourcing, which over the last two decades has proven not only to increase access points
to collections but also to enrich catalogue data. As well, crowdsourcing presents an opportunity
for museums to make what has long been an opaque back-end process more transparent,
turning metadata creation into a mission-supporting activity. Using an adapted practice-based
methodology, this thesis examines projects I devised and led at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium,
Tag Along with Adler, as a case study in the benefits of crowdsourcing projects (and metadata
tagging projects in particular) within cultural heritage institutions, not as mere outsourcing of
labor but rather as participatory, even transformational experiences for an engaged public that
also enhance and expand cataloguing. It also explores the successes and shortcomings of this
case study and what these results suggest for the field at large with respect to language and
metadata production. In particular, it demonstrates that there exists a semantic gap in the
language and descriptive styles of museum professionals, on the one hand, and the public, on
the other, and that crowdsourcing demonstrates promise to help bridge this gap while also
providing an opportunity for the public to engage with museums directly.