The readings:
With regard to this week’s readings, Diane Neal’s “News
Photographers, Librarians, Tags, and Controlled Vocabularies: Balancing the
Forces” (2008) and Barbara Orbach Natanson’s “Worth a Billion Words? Library of
Congress Pictures Online” (2007) are case studies (Neal’s is, whereas
Natanson’s focus is less formal) that both address large-volume collections.
Each article cites the number of images that librarians in news organizations and
the Library of Congress are dealing with, respectively, and for me those
numbers alone presented an extremely persuasive case for tagging. Given that
the goal of these repositories is to make their holdings available
(discoverable and retrievable) to their publics, the organizations simply do
not have the manpower to catalog such huge volumes of works without tagging or
some form of user added description. As Elaine Ménard and Margaret Smithglass
state in “Digital Image Description: A Review of Best Practices in Cultural
Institutions,” (2012), “Without metadata, the digital document has no real
existence since it remains inaccessible” (292). Neal, furthermore, makes an
important point about the need for specialized knowledge, even in the face of
the staggering quantity of images news librarians must manage while meeting
news editors’ demands for fast retrieval to make publication deadlines. Her
article begins (the title) and ends with a call for balance between expert
subject input (from the news photographers) to create metadata and the use of
more natural yet still structured terminology from the librarians. As I have
been learning in Metadata this term, the importance of structure is undeniable.
Interestingly, Neal’s proposal reminded me of Tom Blake’s
term “expert sourcing,” which he prefers to “crowdsourcing.” Blake, the Digital
Projects Manager at the Boston Public Library (BPL), gives the example of a
collection of digitized baseball cards that the BPL has on its Flickr site. No
one in the Library knew enough about baseball to create a good set of search
terms for the collection, so Tom asked for help from an author of several books
on baseball who has done quite a lot of research at the BPL. The author, in
turn, called upon an organization of amateur, yet highly knowledgeable baseball
historians to help create tags for the cards, to the metadata librarian’s
satisfaction.
The Library of Congress Flickr site:
After looking at the records for several images, I was not
overly impressed by the general quality of the tags. For example, for a
photograph of the bandleader Les Brown and Doris Day (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/4843125023/in/set-72157624588645784)
the tags are: “Library of
Congress,” “Doris Day,” “Les Brown,” “woman,” “man,” “smile,” “1940s,”
“forties,” and “blonde.” With the exception of the proper names, which are
already in the title of the photo, and the tag “1940s,” the others are so broad
as to be virtually useless. The terms “bandleader” or “big bands” do not even
appear, and the comments blather on about how young Doris Day is. That said, I
tended to find the comments on the photo pages much more interesting and helpful
than the tags. In several cases the commenters provided solid information that
the Library of Congress could not have supplied without the expense of staff
time devoted to research. For example, for a photo of the Australian pianist
and composer Percy Grainger and his mother (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/9954775204/
), a member of the public signaled that information on Mrs. Grainger could be
found on the Grainger Museum website, and supplied the URL. Kristi, a Prints
and Photos cataloger at the Library of Congress who checks in on the comments
and points out those that will be used to improve the LOC records, wrote to say
that the Library will be adding information from the Grainger Museum website,
based on the help provided in the comment. Another solid example of the
usefulness of tagging on the LOC Flickr site is a photo set entitled “Mystery
Pictures–Solved!”, the title of which says it all.
To answer the question whether the Flickr Commons is an option for collections of all sizes, I would say that for a more manageable smaller collection, where the librarian or curator had subject expertise and the quantity of objects not that onerous to catalog, then Flickr is probably less necessary.
To answer the question whether the Flickr Commons is an option for collections of all sizes, I would say that for a more manageable smaller collection, where the librarian or curator had subject expertise and the quantity of objects not that onerous to catalog, then Flickr is probably less necessary.
The tagging worksheets:
I had tagged very few objects on the Web prior to this
assignment, so, inspired by the inanity of tags I have read yet trying
nonetheless to create useful search terms, I created tags without stressing too
much over their precision (meaning I tried not to think like a subject
cataloger). Then I used my tags to look up terms in the AAT, the TGM, and the
LCSH. The photo of the Chicago artist Ron Blackburn painting a mural was the
easiest to create and to find terms for, because the thesauri for artworks tend
to be some of the best conceived and most precisely populated. The AAT is the
most precise, the LCSH too general, and the TGM sits somewhere in between in
that it supplies more subject language than does the AAT but is looser when it
comes to naming techniques and materials.
What became clear to me over the course of the exercise is
how stilted the language of the LCSH is, and also that despite the quantity of
terms it provides, it is not exhaustive. For example, I wanted a term from a
controlled vocabulary to call attention to the booths in the photo of the
county fair. “Booths” on its own does not exist in the LCSH, and I did not feel
that any of the narrower terms were quite right. “Exhibition booths” in the TGM
is not quite right because some of the booths could have been housing games,
not displays of products. And to get across the idea of game booths, the
closest was “carnival games,” but a carnival is not the same as a county fair.
I realized that in cases such as this, one either has to go without an LCSH
subject term or select one that is not quite accurate, which makes discovery
difficult. The other inconsistency among the authority files is the use of
singular versus plural terms. I began to understand the use of plurals,
finally, in the case of the word “painting.” In the singular, it more
apparently refers to the act of painting, whereas in the plural it refers to
the finished product.
The suggestions for future tag analysis on pages 24–25 of the LOC final report seem to me both sound and highly useful. Bullet point #2, incorporating popular terms into the LCSH, such as "Rose the Riveter" for the more cumbersome combination "Women—employment" and "World War, 1939–1945" makes a lot of sense. As for point #3, importing tags into the LC search environment, I would like to see quality control, not mass importation. Point #4, curating the tags on Flickr, particularly dropping the inaccurate or useless ones, would improve the integrity of the site, I think. Moreover, such curation could take place before a mass importation of tags into the LC search environment. Finally, it might be interesting to somehow tag the tags so that users were aware of which terms were generated by catalogers and which by the public. In any case, what these two pages of the report are getting at are two important areas: (1) terminology quality control and (2) revisiting the definition of the authority file to make it a more accommodating resource.
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