After reviewing many articles with the “museum” tag a few things came to light. One, people love tagging, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Two, sometimes it is. And Three, when it is a bad thing there is usually a simple solution. Some of the articles I read do a great job at minimizing tags and keeping them focused. However, many of the articles I viewed had seven or more tags that seemed, maybe not out of place but, a bit much. Now, I’m new to this and maybe my personality craves simplistic things, but it seems to me that an article with that many tags is a bit excessive. To me, applying that many tags lends itself to a shoddy central thesis or theme. Again, in my opinion, if you cannot tell me about your article in five or less tags, I’m going to assume the article bounces around like a pinball played by Tommy (The pinball wizard, The Who, anyone?).

The solution to this problem is, well, to use less tags and to use them with meaning. For example, an article just posted a few days ago about LGBTQ history and the new public discussion about it was tagged with “Australia, LGBT, museums, National Park Service, public engagement, queer history, United Kingdom.”  First off, the article is great. It is about the steps nations are taking to include LGBTQ history in the public discussion of human history and how museums are presenting it. Well done, Claire Hayward. My gripe is that a couple of the tags don’t get enough attention to warrant their use. The National Park Service is only mentioned briefly and Australia, although covered in a couple of paragraphs, is only used as a comparative to a larger theme-The United Kingdom. It’s clear that the others belong, particularly the museum, public engagement and LGTB tags. Taking those two tags out really nails down the actual scope of the article.

An example of the museum tag I thought was well done was an article about the state of diversity within museum settings and what is being done about it. Again, another great article. Major props to Angela Thorpe. Her tags included “diversity, museums, race, training.” Short and to the point- the entire article revolved around these central themes and, therefore, made the tags relevant and useful.

I think the museums tag is generally well used. One issue i see is the lack of specificity. For example, an article about a particular type of museum, like historic house museums or natural history museums, might do better to include a tag for those either alongside or instead of the “museums” tag. I noticed a couple articles that were about a specific museum type but only used the one “museums” tag. Other than that, please pardon the rant and the lateness, this was a fun assignment.