Embedded Metadata News

Fresh from the Visual Resource Association's (VRA) email list is this post from Greg Reser, which he has given me permission to repost here. Anyone with a Flickr account should check it out.

Embedded Metadata News

Like all of you, I spent my Holiday break reading about metadata, especially embedded metadata.  One blog post I found was from a Flickr developer in response to a complaint the social media companies "own" and "lock-in" their user's content.  The developer responded by saying that Flickr allows full access to all of the content users upload and create, including Descriptions and Tags, http://laughingmeme.org/2010/05/18/minimal-competence-data-access-data-ownership-and-sharecropping/ .  This is good news because it means that all that work you did tagging your photos is not limited to your Flickr page, you can download it to your computer or share it with other social media sites.  You enter the data once and then reuse it over and over.

Unfortunately, this data access comes via the Flickr API, meaning you have to be a programmer to get at it.  The good news is that some developers have created free or low cost applications to backup your Flickr content.  Best of all, they all have the cute missing "e" in their name.  For those of you have been looking for a way to get your metadata out of Flickr, you might try one of these apps.  The only limit I have found is that these apps do not export any custom metadata that was originally uploaded to Flickr.  So, if used a custom tool like the VRA Photoshop panel to add VRA metadata, it won't be downloaded.  It is possible to do this, just not with these apps.

Flickr Edit (Windows) - FREE (upload/download photos and EXIF and IPTC metadata metadata) http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157602367520002/

Downloadr (Windows) - FREE (download photos and metadata EXIF and IPTC metadata) http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/12400/

Bulkr (Windows, Mac) - FREE for basic (download photos), $24.95 for pro (download photos and metadata EXIF and IPTC metadata.  Also exports .txt file of metadata!) http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157622874451890/

You can find lots of other useful Flickr apps on the Flickr App Garden - http://www.flickr.com/services/

Besides retrieving metadata for your own photos, this ability could also be put to use for collecting images and metadata from groups.  For instance, you could have faculty and students upload and tag their own photos in Flickr, say of field work they did documenting architecture, and then you could download them and parse out the metadata into your institutional database.

Greg Reser

Arts Library

University of California, San Diego

greser@ucsd.edu

Ah Metadata...

Jason Roy, at the Digital Collections Unit/Digital Library Development Lab, University of Minnesota had a word of encouragement for all those archivists out there while speaking at the VRA conference this year.  "You don't have to catalog on the item level." 

One of his archives received funding to scan an enormous collection for which they just had finding aids. For those not up on archival cataloging, it is customary to describe a collection by elements within a box, possibly a folder. So, you might have a folder of letters to Mr. Deere over a period of time. Alternatively, you might have a box of the Deere family memorabilia, estimated to cover 20 years of their lives.  The archivist will browse through said folder or box, looking for the item he desires.  The finding aid will give him a general idea where to best look.

Most digital collections have insisted that archivist must now throw some metadata at each item as it is converted to a digital format, so that an item is retrievable. 

Well, Jason, upon being confronted with the daunting task of converting this large collection to a digital format in the conventional manner, said no. Rather, they would place digital files in the appropriately labeled folder according to the box / folder information that existed already and would published a finding aid to direct the searcher to the appropriate "holder,"  which the searcher could then browse looking for the desired item.  No promises that it was there.  This is not ideal, but it is as good as the existing condition.  When you also throw in the technical ability to tag digital files with further information as researchers retrieve material, it means it will be a growing evolving catalog.  In addition, if you then embed the descriptive metadata that you have in each file, the digital file will always be identifiable without being bloated.

This approach would free up so many of our archives, if more special collections could accept it.  What do you think?

How Do I Find the Right Words?

While I did not hear Dr. Judy Weidman explain how cataloging is an art and not a science, I believe that she is on the right track. As an image cataloger, I can relate to her assertions about the cataloging process particularly as it pertains to architecture: uncertainty is always present, design is non-linear and one is imposing an order. In many cases, I simply do not know enough.

Those of us who experienced the development, release, promulgation, and implementation of controlled vocabularies which are now used to tag works or documents that we are cataloging in order to facilitate straightforward retrieval, appreciate the consistency that authorized terminology brings to our cataloging. We avoid many of the pitfalls of databases replete with homographs, synonyms, and worse. Our choices when applying authorized terminology are supported by discipline specific user warrant thus providing welcome consistency both within our local databases and in the aggregate as they are shared within and beyond institutional borders. Our work became much easier when these authoritative vocabularies became widely available.

And, yet, there is so much that I as a visual resources’ cataloger fail to notice or simply don’t or can’t know. While my lack of knowledge might be discipline based, this is not necessarily the case. Images are used so ubiquitously by all sorts of people for many different reasons that it is impossible for a single cataloger facing a data input screen to capture it all. This is where folksonomy--also known as social tagging, social indexing or social classification--becomes useful. This collaborative creation and management of descriptive tags contributed by end users adds an important level of descriptive information that is both democratically based and current. It can provide information that I simply do not and cannot know. This is why the Library of Congress Flickr Project was so successful; this is why museums are building on the experience of Steve.Museum.

Yes, there is still a huge role for our favorite authorized vocabularies to play as we describe images. The Getty Art History Information Program vocabularies (AAT, ULAN, TGN, and soon CONA) along with the Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (TGM-I, TGM II), and the Library of Congress Authorities (NAF, SAF) will continue to provide a base level of consistency, timelessness, and stability to our descriptive practices. We need both approaches.