The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a three-year grant of $413,378 to support a project investigating and evaluating ways of improving library and museum searching and social tagging by presenting users with thesauri, taxonomies, and other structured vocabularies as a way to discover relevant content. The results will ultimately be useful to a wide range of museum and library users and can be directly applied by library and museum service providers and search engine designers. The project consists of lead applicant Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology as well as Artstor, University at Buffalo, Getty Research Institute, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Visit the IMLS website for more details.