One of the major challenges when digitising large photographic collections is the need to create descriptive metadata for each individual image. To make a collection searchable, each photograph requires hand crafted subject headings and keywords to describe its content. Currently, we use the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials as a guideline to their creation. However, as the pace of digitisation increases, so does the pressure to generate the descriptive keywords and tags that allows the search mechanism to work. As this can be a labour intensive task, the scanning process is often completed long before all of the material has been suitably described.
To ensure we have a fluid workflow in which material is available as soon as possible after digitisation, we need to think of new and innovative ways in which to create this valuable metadata. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by asking our users to get involved.
During last weeks Europeana Open Culture Conference in Amsterdam, one of the key areas of discussion were the ways in which heritage institutions are directly engaging with their users in the realm of User Generated Content and Crowd Sourcing. So far, we have only limited experience with this model, with uploads to the Flickr Commons. However, while this has encouraged some interesting creative projects based around our collections, it has not yet generated much in the way of useful metadata. Of course, this method of crowd sourcing to enrich content is not new; Wikipedia is built on the premise that users create and edit the content themselves, and we have already worked on community projects through Culturenet that have relied heavily on voluntary contributions from our users.
However, describing photographs that are often location specific does present a different kind of challenge; one that requires at least some specialist knowledge. The key outcome from the User Generated Content track at the conference was the importance of a strong community to ensure success in crowd-sourcing. So with this in mind, perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on developing our user communities before we start developing the complex tools that allow them to enrich our metadata.
As I left the conference, there was one quote that stuck in my head – The more integrated our users feel with the project, the more they want to contribute to its success. That pretty much summed it up for me – After all it’s the users that stand to gain the most.