By the way, you might be interested to review this report written by Joe Dalton
at NYPL about their experience in the Flickr Commons. Not literary metadata, but
interesting nonetheless:
"Can Structured Metadata Play Nice with Tagging Systems? Parsing New Meanings
from Classification-Based Descriptions on Flickr"
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/dalton/dalton.html
Abstract
By the time The New York Public Library (NYPL) joined The Commons on Flickr,
almost a year after The Library of Congress (LOC) had launched the initial pilot
project, it was clear there is great potential for user-generated content to
shed new light on archival imagery in ways that are difficult to achieve with
more traditional methods. Many of the earliest Commons images contained little
or no prior description, and users were encouraged to tag these records with
much-needed metadata. Images uploaded more recently by Commons partners often
have included associated metadata, and this fact has been dealt with differently
by various institutions. Some choose to not upload that data; others upload
subject-headings, but only as descriptive text; still others add selected
subject headings as single tags across a set of items.
When the library uploaded its first set of 1,300 images in late 2008, it was
thus faced with a number of questions about what type of metadata should also be
uploaded. Should we hide or cloak the structured metadata (subject headings,
name authority files, etc.) associated with these images? Or could we try to
contribute our pre-existing subjects as tags? Although Flickr machine-tags have
emerged as one option for exposing controlled vocabularies on Flickr, what if
our structured metadata could look – and behave – more like user-generated tags
from the beginning?
This paper discusses the rationale behind NYPL's decision to combine existing
metadata – in the form of subject headings – with user-generated tags, and
demonstrates some of the challenges, benefits and drawbacks for institutions
that may be interested in using similar approaches for their own collections.
Keywords: tagging, folksonomy, metadata, Flickr Commons, classification systems
Cheers,
george
Received on Thu Jul 01 2010 - 14:49:03 EDT