Crowdsourcing may seem like a divergence from metadata, however, I recently read an interesting article about the mobile efforts of the Smithsonian and it made me think about how to organize information aggregated from various contributors.
The article contrasts the Smithsonian's historical information collection methods from telegraph to mobile device. "Today, the Smithsonian has even more powerful social media and mobile platforms that enable it to “recruit the world” to help with its important work."
Take the Smithsonian Flickr Commons as an example. The list of tags alone conveys the complexity of digitally displaying and organizing even a small subset of Smithsonian collection holdings. Metadata control is one of the only surefire methods of ensuring findability.
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