Metadata Monday: Descriptive Camera

Here is an idea that touches upon many of my favorite concepts about the subjectivity of image description in metadata. The Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson is a prototype designed to capture the "aboutness" of images rather than the usual camera generated metadata like date, capture time and location.

This nifty device would garner descriptions via the Mechanical Turk API by Amazon. Essentially the camera would efficiently crowd source descriptive data. Since photo keywords and descriptions are subjective, humans would actually provide the details.

The flaws inherent to this design are the same as any user generated tagging - lack of consistency and vocabulary control, mispellings and misinterpretations. It seems to me that a final step might be to parse the information provided by the humans and cross check it against a controlled vocabulary to turn the data into cleaner searchable keywords.

Still, this is a pretty thought provoking concept!

5 Things Thursday: DAM, Outsourcing, Big Metadata and TV

Here are five more things:

1. Is DAM the future of customer experience?
2. Who can do my keywording and scanning?
3. Are you concerned about your megabyte budget?
4. What does big metadata mean for the future of TV?
5. Need a comprehensive book about metadata for digital collections?

Metadata Monday: Metadata Fights Cyber-Crime!

Check out this story about an alleged hacker caught by the FBI. It seems that a photo of the hacker's girlfriend posted on Twitter was linked to the alleged hacker's Facebook page and that the GPS metadata embedded in the photo (oops!) was then used to pinpoint his whereabouts.

This case is a perfect example of the power metadata in digital forensics. More information, including the fateful image, can be found here on The Hacker News. For additional information on Forensic FOCA, a tool for forensic analysts focused on the use of metadata files to generate a forensic case, check out this site.

5 Things Thursday: Bugs Bunny, Digital Preservation, LinkedIn

Here are five more things. The list is endless.

1. Check out Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary over on the Archive of American Television.
2. Ever wonder how the big players in film manage their productivity and workflow?
3. Want to protect your digital assets during nuclear disaster?
4. Is LinkedIn worth the effort?
5. Explore digitization quantity versus quality.

Metadata Monday: Metadata is Everyone's Responsibility

Ever wonder how the publishing industry is integrating metadata into their workflow? Check out this great interview with Workflow Maven Laura Dawson.

Like many other industries, the publishing industry certainly recognizes the need to metadata especially in the world of e-books, but has tended to assign one person to the task of metadata creation and application.

Instead, as Laura points out, everyone in an organization needs to take responsibility for their own metadata whether in marketing, production or editorial. As individuals enter and use metadata related to their particular niche, the metadata develops more accuracy and becomes useful and complete.

In addition, editors in particular need to develop comfort with entering metadata. Ultimately, the success and quality of metadata depends on many stakeholders not just one person.

5 Things Thursday: DAM Extravaganza

Here are five DAM things for your perusal:

1. Learn about how Corinthian Colleges manages their assets.
2. What do you need to know to manage your video with DAM?
3. How is digital asset management used in social media strategy?
4. More on optimizing SharePoint search and findability.
5. Get the DAM lowdown from open source to webinars on CMSwire.

Metadata Monday: Protect Your Images!

Anyone who creates an image should be concerned about protecting it. James Provost wrote an amazing post on the subject of protecting illustrations on the site TechnicalIllustrators.org. By making it easy for people to trace the provenance of the image, you can help ensure that it is used correctly.

The information James provides can certainly apply to photos as well as illustrations and offers simple steps to batching metadata using Adobe Bridge and setting up metadata templates in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Although this information is well covered, this post simplifies it to a step-by-step set of instructions with screenshots that will take very little time to implement for your own needs.

As James says:

There is little you can do to stop someone who is determined to steal your images. Watermarks are easily removed and website scripts are defeated with a simple screen grab. These attempts only mar your work and make your site difficult to navigate.

In this tutorial I’m not talking about protection from image thiefs, I’m talking about protection from lost opportunities. Times when your images are inevitably downloaded, blogged, cropped, reblogged, faved and saved, and end up orphaned on someone’s hard drive, ffffound, imgfave, tumblr, or email—especially when that person likes your work and would really love to hire you, if they could just figure out where the image came from.

Happy Easter from NYPL Digital Archives!

5 Things Thursday: Photo Metadata, DAM, MARC, Romanian Libraries

Here are five more things:

1. Want to read an overview of digital asset management that seems to imply that a DAM system can somehow operate without a digital asset manager?
2. Are you interested in the Controlled Vocabulary Survey regarding the preservation of photo metadata by social media websites?
3. What low-hanging fruit can be plucked from the MARC tree of knowledge?
4. Are moving image archives in the news more lately?
5. Check out a Romanian library campaign.

Metadata Monday: A Nice Intro to Metadata and Taxonomy

There is a great basic introduction to metadata and taxonomy over on the blog Brain Traffic. This post simplifies these often intimidating concepts and even includes helpful diagrams. From the main types of metadata and how they work together to taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, this post sums it all up beautifully in the section "Let's Get Together, yeah yeah yeah."

At its simplest, a taxonomy organizes information, and metadata describes it.

Culminating with a handy resource list pointing to some of the usual suspects (NISO) as well as to some less mainstream blogs and workshops, this is an awesome starting point for anyone hoping to learn more about metadata and taxonomy sans head spinning.