The Your Paintings website allows the public to tag paintings. Tagging involves choosing your own words to describe what can be seen in a selection of paintings and classifying paintings in a variety of ways. So if there were a cat in the painting, you might add the tag ‘cat’, or if you recognised the place in the painting, you could add the tag ‘Baldock’ or ‘Willian Pond’. You might know the subject of the painting and add the tag ‘Thomas Currel’, or you might know that the painting shows a particular event, and add the tag ‘First World War’.

Tagging the paintings helps people find their way around the website and locate paintings more easily. Tagging also encourages people to explore paintings that they wouldn’t automatically look at.

Why not have a go at tagging some of the paintings in our collections? For more information on tagging, and to find out how you can get started, have a look at http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/

Find our paintings here: Letchworth Museum and Art Gallery and Hitchin Museum and Art Gallery.

Your Paintings Tagger
tagger.thepcf.org.uk
Your Paintings Tagger is a unique project that is helping search online our entire national collection of oil paintings – some 200,000 works in total

The UK holds in its galleries and civic buildings over 200,000 oil paintings spanning 600 years of art history – arguably the greatest national collection of its kind in the world. But a staggering 80% of these works are in storage or held behind closed doors, hidden from the very people who own them – the UK public.

But now, through a joint effort by the BBC, The Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) and a range of partners, the entire collection is available online for everyone to enjoy!

Today marks the launch of a month of activities across the UK to celebrate this fact, You can read all about it here.

Although Hitchin and Letchworth Museums are currently closed as we work on the new museum, we will be posting some activities here that you can still take part in using the oil paintings in our collections!

Paintings set for local landmarks
www.bbc.co.uk

Buildings around the UK are to have art projected upon them later to celebrate the completion of a website showing the national collection of oil paintings.

Behind the Scenes work on the Football collection has allowed us to piece together the evidence in the history of some football boots…

Boots mystery owner is revealed

www.bbc.co.uk

The mystery owner of a pair of football boots in a Hertfordshire museum archive is revealed as England footballer Sir Stanley Matthews.