Are you interested in a ton of useful and current information related to photo metadata? Well, this link to notes and presentations from the Photo Metadata Conference 2012 at CEPIC will keep you quite amused for days on end. With sessions moderated by David Riecks on the topics of search - finding the image, finding the rights, and the future of search and image licensing, there are presentations here from industry leaders.

Mary Forster, Director Search Strategy at Getty Images, presented on open linked data and its potential within the picture library industry. Thinking of open linked data like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the information here demonstrates through tangible examples how machine readability, unambiguous entries, dynamic, frequently updated collective intelligence can lead to greater findability and inform browse.

Andrew LaBonte, Director Search Metadata at Corbis presented on the future of search. From open source search engines to crowdsourcing, this presentation delves deeply into one of my favorite subjects - can keywording be crowdsourced? Differentiating between simple and complex tasks seems the key to the proper utilization of crowdsourced knowledge, because “people like to tag images.”

Mr. LaBonte also explores Algorithm “Magic” vs. Metadata “Reality.” Here is a formula for the future:

The Future = (constant algorithm refinement and innovation)
+

(increased metadata consistency and standardization)

The section on click metrics compares keywording relevance to customer relevance - subjectivity in image description. With a lovely example showing that one person’s cute baby may not be another person’s cute baby, click metrics may eventually be the way to effectively harness and target search results on a more personal level.

These were not the only presentations featured, but I have been fortunate to intern in Mary’s group at Getty and to see Mr. LaBonte in the hallways at Corbis. I hope someday to attend CEPIC and perhaps even present on similar topics. For now, I will soak up all the information here and you can enjoy it as well.

Here are five things:

1. Is now the time for librarians?
2. Interested in Accessibility Camp Seattle 2012?
3. How do you set priorities?
4. What is the role of digital librarians in asset management?
5. Support the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Do you know what a “catablog” is? I didn’t (or at least I didn’t realize that I did) until I read this awesome post on the OCLC hangingtogether.org blog. A “catablog” can create searchable, browseable online presentations of collections, essentially a low budget collection management method.

I think blogs that promote certain key collections, like my favorites at the University of Washington or Duke University, can be considered catablogs. A blog can also organize a group of digital collections like ArchiveGrid.

In any event, you can and should read this whole post which not only points to an interesting report calledThe Metadata IS the Interface, but contains this quote which sums it all up for me:

“Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance.”

I write this blog because I like to share my excitement over a variety of metadata, digital, and library topics. If it drives traffic to some unexpected places, I’ve done my job. So, in an effort to economically market any valuable digital resource like a special collection, why not blog?

Here are five more things:

1. What is an art lending library?
2. What are the relative merits of analog versus digital film from an archiving perspective?
3. Check out these inspired apps for organization.
4. Does your DAM solution scale?
5. How can we ensure the future of libraries?

The Henry Stewart Events Digital Asset Management conference in New York happened on May 10 and 11th. As always, the topics looked saliant with a lot of focus on my favorite topics - metadata and creative workflow as related to DAM. Here is a sysnopsis of the best Tweets from the two day event #DAMNY:

• Seth Earley: content curation is key (along with metadata and taxonomies) to remove all the noise from the data…
• Jake Athey: “You shouldn’t plant it if you don’t want to eat it” — good gardening analogy for metadata…John Horodyski: DAM needs to be mobile, current and linked
• Theresa Regli: talking web 3.0 “data is the new oil” always enjoy his use of media and imagery (Mark Davey)
• David Riecks: “Find the dancers and get the dancers on the dance floor” to infect adoption when implementing DAM
• Seth Earley: Metadata must have a purpose
• John Horodyski: DAM vendors…standards, standards, standards
• John Horodyski: Metadata is cumulative

Here are five more things and then some:

1. Read about Photos Pro for the iPad.
2. Ever wonder where the cute animal photos come from and the copyright implications?
3. If I lived in NY, I would go to Using Metadata for Audiovisual Collection Management.
4. How to set up your home office for remote work.
5. Check out CONTENTdm in action.

BONUS: check out The Signal, the LOC digital preservation publication.

Here is a simple guide to maximizing metadata when self publishing online. Joel Friedlander, veteran writer/book designer/publishing acumen presents a concise overview of e-book metadata and then delves into how to use keywords with particular metadata fields to create a “secret sauce” that becomes the search-related verbal key to your book’s discoverability online.

Taking it one step further, an author might perform some similar searches on similar items to amass relevant keyword ideas and then edit and customized based on their particular work. Another powerful point that Joel makes is that you can always go back to refine the keywords over time to better sell your content.

Here are five marvelous things:

1. Enjoy my former professor Meredith Farkas reflecting on her first year in an interesting and challenging academic library position.
2. Find out about the importance of updating metadata in DAM systems.
3. Check out an interesting infographic - is the digital world killing creativity?
4. Why did Harvard release big data for over 12 million books?
5. Create custom confidential metadata fields in Aperture.

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!

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?