Whenever I write a blog or upload a picture to my Flickr site, I face the issue of helping people stumble across it in their search for a breathtaking image or sentence. Ha! Maybe sometimes.

When I finish the blog I have a chance to enter "tags" that will classify it. I'm about to write one about a performance of a song by Schubert titled "Gute Nacht." The song is part of a "song cycle" titled "Die Winterreise." The artist is Dietrich "Fischer-Dieskau." The medium is "vocal music", "German Lied," "art song" and Lord knows how many other decent terms. I have to remember to enclose multi-word tags in quotes and to separate tags with commas outside the quotes! If I provide those tags, you will find my moving and insightful blog when you Google for "Schubert" or "Fischer-Dieskau" or "German Lied."

Now multiply my small tagging challenge with the one faced by an Art Museum that wants to put images of the collection on line. You can see how some professionals are thinking about this by visiting The Art Museum Social Tagging Project. I have subscribed to a discussion group, and I suppose you can, too. What's going on here should be of interest to Missouri history organizations. When you decide to put your photos and archives on line, you'll need to consider how to tag those things.

Better yet, you'll involve the public in tagging your collection. You'll be, dare I say it, visitor-centered in your thinking. That's where you can get on board a fabulous experiment at the Library of Congress. Just go to the Flickr Commons and see what LOC is trying to do with people like you!