The steve project was founded in 2005 to address concerns by art museums about access to their ever-growing online collections. As museums were welcoming increasing numbers of visitors to their online outposts, they were also discovering that these visitors struggled to navigate digital collections. The problem, in part, stemmed from a semantic gap that separated museums’ formal descriptions of works—usually created by art historians or other specialists—and the vernacular language used by the general public for searching. This language, reflecting the broad range of needs and perspectives of users, simply did not exist in collection documentation. Project team members believed that by employing the then-emerging technology of social tagging and its resulting folksonomies we might bridge the semantic gap by engaging users in the time-consuming and expensive task of describing our collections; add a multi-cultural, perhaps multi-lingual perspective to our documentation; and possibly even develop strategies for engaging new types of users in looking at and thinking about art. We were also intrigued by the potential of the medium to expose our professional staff—curators, educators, and others—to direct evidence of how works of art in our collections were perceived by visitors. We formed a collaboration, open to anyone interested in thinking about social tagging and its value to museums, and began to develop a set of open source tools for collecting, managing, and analyzing user-contributed descriptions.