Describing images

From our readings and doing a little searching on the web, it seems that there is a general consensus in the library world that there should be a mix of controlled vocabulary terms and user-generated tags. These compliment each other and help to create a more complete description of images.

Controlled vocabularies are useful because they give researchers structure that helps guide their research. This can be helpful to researchers but it is also limited by the knowledge of the person who is adding search terms. As Joan M. Schwartz explained, “The words we choose to describe what we do reflect our view of the world, the values we hold, the things of this world that we value. Yet archivists continue to employ language, sometimes based on erroneous assumptions about the nature of photographs, other times derived from concepts borrowed from other professions, which privilege some archival materials and marginalize others.” Controlled vocabularies are generally built with more academic purposes in mind.

There are a lot of benefits to using user-generated tags. User-generated tags include a much wider range of terms that allow images to be accessed by a much wider audience. This makes it so that images can have a more diverse and richer description of what is going on in pictures. Plus, user-generated tags come at no costs to libraries and archives. Further, allowing users to create tags makes working with images more interactive and gets users involved with library materials. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems that come with letting users create tags. One of the biggest problems with using user-generated tags is that people will use random search words to tag images that will lead other people to search results that have nothing to do with the search terms that they used.

I think that Flickr Commons can benefit collections of all sizes. Flickr Commons reaches a large audience. It is a socially oriented photo archive; it is interactive and fun for users. If any organization wants its collection to reach more people, using a platform that has a completely new audience will get its photos viewed by more people.

Resource list:

Schwartz, J. M. (2002). Coming to terms with photographs : Descriptive standards, linguistic “othering,” and the margins of archivy. Archivaria 54, 147.