ABSTRACT
The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) based at the University of Glasgow and the BBC all share the aim of making information on the painting collections of the United Kingdom's museums and galleries more readily accessible. The PCF, a London-based charity, was set up by Fred Hohler in 2003 to record and publish details and images of all 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. Metadata or data about data are of course essential if an object is to be identified and found in a database or website. Users of an online database or other text expect to be able to find the objects or references they are interested in. The development of Your Paintings Tagger (YPT) shows that it is possible to create a successful crowdsourcing architecture to allow the public to contribute high quality tags to an art collection of national importance.
