I expect this has happened to many others, especially since the advent of the smart phone/pad computer and the ubiquity of the web. At any rate, it happens regularly with me.
My wife and I were watching a DVD the other night, when an actor appeared that she recognized from some other (unknown) context. Armed with my handy-dandy iPad, I opened the IMDb app and looked for the program we were watching (in this case, an episode of a series called MI-5). Not knowing the name of the actor, I browsed through the images of the actors appearing in that episode and found the one she was talking about. Clicking on his image, I was taken to his IMDb page, with all the other films and series he had appeared in. There I was able to identify Downton Abbey as that other context.
Although the actor's name was revealed in the course of my search, I began my search with just an image, not a name. And in fact I reached my destination entirely via images. I would never have reached my destination in the absence of the image.
As online catalogs routinely include images of the covers of books, etc., to facilitate identification, we may want to start including images of people, etc., in authority records in order to facilitate all the FRBR user tasks.
Ed Jones
Associate Director, Assessment and Technical Services
National University Library
9393 Lightwave Avenue
San Diego, California 92123-1447
+1 858 541 7920 (voice)
+1 858 541 7997 (fax)
http://national.academia.edu/EdJones
Received on Wed Aug 29 2012 - 19:20:01 EDT