Tagging blog post.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Therein lies a great problem: who gets to decide what those thousand words are? What if what you see is different from one someone else sees? And what if you have a word limit and can’t use a thousand words? Describing photographs and allowing users access to them through tagging is an important issue that has come up, especially with the popularity of the Commons.

 I think the ultimate pro of having uncontrolled vocabularies for photographic collections is that it gives the users a chance to identify and connect with what they are seeing. Often times, there is a gap between how administrators, metadata creators, and photographers describe photographs and how users describe photographs.  When you allow users to participate in the tagging process, it allows communal and individual memories of people, places, and events to become collective memories.  One person may not know what the proper/formal word of what they are seeing is but they may have used a different, more colloquial word.  This allows more people to access photographs because when they search for the colloquial term, photographs will still pop up.

 That being said, tagging needs to be monitored and as some of the statistics from the LOC document reveal, the uncontrolled vocabulary can be a problem with tagging errors such as typos, inaccurate word mergers, and overly broad tags. If you want to be able to access these photographs, it is important to set a standard for search terms. The problem these days is that more and more users are not being educated in how to search for what they want. People are lazy. They don’t want to have to remember the synonyms for words that they are trying to search, they just want it to come up in their first search, on the first result page. Tagging seems to be a temporary fix for this growing problem (in my humblest opinion), but  I think people should be educated in how to search collections, including photographs. Archival and library education is very important and often overlooked. I don't think it's too much for people to learn standard identification terms. I know people in our field are always looking to make searching easier for users but they also have a responsibility to learn appropriate search terms. I

The problem with that (learning appropriate search terms) is interpretation of what you are seeing, which is why tagging helps. But it should not be the only solution.