Here are five amazing things:
I ran across an interesting book on Amazon recently - Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith. Written in the dark ages of social media, 2008, this book still offers a relevant and insightful look into the power of people for tagging the internet universe.
Touting tags as a springboard to new ideas, Smith explores tagging for classification, visualization and exploration. As one might expect, taxonomies and folksonomies are discussed as well as real world examples from Flickr and Amazon.
As more and more metadata is generated collectively, it is worth revisiting this resource.
Here are 5 more fascinating things to ponder:
BONUS: Why did Posterous just spontaneously change my blog design? No, really…
By now, I am sure you are all aware of Pinterest - the well designed curation site allowing ease of sharing or as they put it “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.”
Pinterest is being touted as the next big thing in social media and as exemplifying a cosmic shift from search to discovery. While I have long been a fan of using social bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious to collect content for my blog, Pinterest takes this type of curation to a new more visually appealing level.
I think I will find it useful in organizing ideas and inspirations for shopping and reading and movie watching in my personal life and it is fascinating to see what my friends pin - from my shoe obsessed art director pal with impeccable taste to photography buffs and crafty crafters.
I can’t help but wonder, however, if the rich data collected from the participants will somehow mean that now we are all crowdsourcing market research. Like a giant digital focus group, we are telling advertisers what interests us and doesn’t. I see a future where my sidebars become even more Orwellian.
Street scenes instead of iconic landscapes on view now at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Here are your 5 things:
Check out Walking Paper’s User Experience grab bag.
Concerned about password security? Here is an apt infographic.
Read this interview with Library Scenester Erin Dorney.
Sick of SOPA? If not, here is the creative community perspective.
Want to be an international librarian? Hack Lib School has you covered!
Did you know that there is an annual Taxonomy Bootcamp? Well, mark your calendars for October 16th and 17th, 2012.
I have been considering conferences or events that might prove useful to my position as a digital asset manager. Having attended DAM events in the past, focusing on one aspect of DAM like taxonomy and controlled vocabulary may prove beneficial.
Check out the astute observations on The Taxonomy Blog gleaned from the 2011 event Tweets. Sounds like trends at the event included using facets or term sets for ease of updates, the challenge and necessity of incorporating social media (folksonomy) into taxonomies, and taxonomy tools.
Are you in the enviable planning stage of a DAM project considering metadata fields? If so, check out this information from Another DAM blog and podcast on metadata standards.
Henrik de Gyor touches upon some of the core resources for metadata planning including the NISO guide to understanding metadata. This comprehensive guide covers metadata standards, creating metadata and other related topics like interoperability.
A newer valuable resource is the Visualization of the Metadata Universe by Jen Riley. “The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. This visual map of the metadata landscape is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards.”
Examining these resources when planning metadata will provide a solid foundation from which you can incorporate and create elements specific to your organization’s needs. One of my favorite tactics is creating a “metadata mashup” by combining elements from several different schemas in a customized manner. For instance, I like to use Dublin Core, IPTC and VRA Core for a lot of image related cataloging.
Here are five things to explore this week:
Check out these comprehensive wikis created by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The User Guide provides an in-depth overview of Dublin Core and linked data.
Creating Metadata continues the saga, going into detail about the process of producing resources, properties and values for each DC element. The tables and examples are invaluable.
Finally, Publishing Metadata explains how to properly utilize DCMI metadata as linked data, code and all.
Going beyond the information available on the main Dublin Core website, this series of wikis really gets to the core of Dublin Core.
Here are your weekly five things:
BONUS: Non-Librarian jobs for LIS grads…
Admittedly, sometimes I get bored reading about metadata projects and this week I really wanted to write something fluffy. Imagine my excitement when I stumbled across a project devoted to creating metadata and controlled vocabulary for a perfume museum.
Fragonard’s Musee de Parfum and the Théâtre des Capucines Museum in Paris offer unique explorations into the world of perfumes. A proposal by Jessica Mlotkowski, MLIS candidate at the University of North Carolina, outlines a plan for creating a taxonomy for the classification of traditional and modern perfumes for the museum and its various online collections and retail needs.
The approach to creating this custom thesaurus stems from a combination of sources including the usual suspects like the LCSH, the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus Online and the UK Archival Thesaurus (UKAT) as well as retail sites like Sephora.com and Perfumes.com. Classification graphs from the Farina-Haus Fragrance Museum’s research webpage were incorporated.
An analysis of the 11th edition of the H&R Genealogy of Feminine Fragrances and Michael Edward’s 1983 fragrance wheel were thrown into the mix and the resulting thesaurus is pungent with possibility. I think anyone attempting to create a taxonomy and apply metadata to a specialized collection like a perfume collection can benefit from reading this creative and thoughtful paper.
Here are five things to start off 2012:
Another DAM Blog featured a fantastic list of the levels of digital asset management experience a couple weeks ago. Including common DAM tasks ranging from basic search, applying metadata, running reports and setting user roles all the way up to more complex endeavors like training users and justifying ROI. This list offers a valuable gauge to assess your own experience level working with DAM systems.
Each level can have additional layers as well. For instance, uploading and applying metadata can be as simple as loading images with metadata embedded or as complicated as employing a different tool in the DAM workflow prior to ingestion (we use Lightroom) and bulk editing some metadata fields after ingestion. For more on uploading and metadata, see this in depth explanation also on Another DAM Blog.
I was pleased to see that I have pretty much touched upon each level. I could use more experience justifying the value of the DAM system I administer. How does your DAM experience stack up?
5 things to round out a successful 2011 with almost 10K blog hits. Thanks, readers!
BONUS: 34 Photoshop tutorials…
Although I have written about the Embedded Metadata Manifesto previously a few months ago, a recent CNET piece talks about permanent metadata here.
In it they restate that the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) in London, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) have banded together to take the issue of data persistence one step further by proposing that permanent metadata be applied to images, text, audio and video files.
The piece raises important questions such as when cameras, mobile phones and other devices evolve to include more and more specific information embedded into files that they create, what are the ramifications of having identifying information included in every single digital file?
The manifesto is at present just a document but raises an important discussion about the sort of information being stored within metadata, and that your content-creation devices are probably capturing more data than you think.
Here are five things to ring in the holidays:
There is a post on ZDNet by Dana Gardner that is getting a lot of social media action. Here is the summary:
Metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusion and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities.
Indeed, this post is chock full of enterprise metadata catch phrases and terms ranging from those that are comprehensible like unstructured data and GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to those that require some thinking like holistic data set and actionable data.
The panel of experts featured bring up some excellent points, however. One of my favorites is from Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research “Obviously, you can’t boil the ocean, but I think you want to start with some data which becomes more valuable, and this comes back to the point that you talked about as the right data. Start with the right data and look at those data points that are being shared and consumed by many users, business users, and that’s going to be valuable for the business itself.”
The over-arching theme is that data is being created and consumed at breakneck speeds. Organizations are dealing with many disparate systems, user groups, contributors, stakeholders and levels of data quality. Virtualization and orchestration is about distilling, integrating and using the best data efficiently.
In case you are still doing holiday shopping, books are always a great gift. Here is a great guide from my favorite design blog Design Sponge.
The Design Sponge team has impeccable taste and the books featured in this guide are unique and lovely. From Vogue: The Covers to Pantone: The 20th Century in Color, this list offers something for everyone.
Mushrooms, department stores, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the guy who built a toaster from scratch instead of buying one at Target, this list is as fun to read as the books featured. Happy holidays!
Here are more than five things to consider.
BONUS: PACA Rogue Website List of Photo Copyright Infringments
This blog has previously discussed automated metadata creation and while I do believe that we still need humans to evaluate the subjective, utilizing tools to streamline workflow is always a benefit in the resource deprived information industry.
SKOSsy is a SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) which generates thesauri dynamically in English and German using DBPedia , an independent project to extract structured data from Wikipedia. SKOSsy produces ‘seed’ thesauri to provide a solid headstart in a thesaurus project, generating the data in mere minutes. Even with refinement, enrichment and a little editing, employing SKOSsy can save significant time.
For more about the possibilities, see this post from the Semantic Web Company.
Here is The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2011. I personally think it was a good year for fiction with some of my favorites including The Barbarian Nurseries, The Buddha in the Attic, Ten Thousand Saints, and This Beautifiul Life.
Also listed are notable non fiction which are often great choices for holiday gift time. Blood, Bones and Butter or Moby Duck might make nice gifts as well as art history tomes on Caravaggio or Van Gogh.
Here are five things for this week:
BONUS: Little Printer will produce a custom mini newspaper so you can stop reading on your phone.
Want to know how to clean up and reconcile your metadata? Check out this site from the Free Your Metadata team. Free Your Metadata is a scientific collaboration between Multimedia Lab (ELIS — Ghent University / IBBT) and MasTIC (Université Libre de Bruxelles).
The clean up process employs Google Refine and there is a screencast demonstrating its use with example data from the Powerhouse Museum.
The goal of the reconciliation step is to connect collection-specific vocabulary to a controlled vocabulary like the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
Ultimately, the goal of squeaky clean metadata is interoperability, to prepare data for the Linked Data Cloud. Free your metadata!
I really dig the guidelines featured on the UPDIG site.
The UPDIG guidelines aim to clarify issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital images. These guidelines were created to establish photographic standards and practices for photographers, designers, printers, and image distributors. The guidelines cover Digital Asset Management, Color Profiling, Metadata, and Photography Workflow.
The most useful sections for me are on file naming, digital image workflow and a rich resource on metadata. Each set of guidelines is customized to a particular audience as well.
Thanks to David Riecks, a contributing editor to the UPDIG project, for pointing this site out.
Here are five things to ponder as you wonder where 2011 went.
Check out this comprehensive guide on lifehacker for whipping your music library metadata into shape. This information covers cleaning up both primary tags like artist and album and secondary tags like genre or year.
As your music library grows into the thousands, the ability to search and locate tunes is reliant on good metadata. Auto generated data is often inaccurate and employing the clean up tools mentioned in this article like Jaikoz and MP3tag can help you tackle issues in batches efficiently and quickly.
Here is an amazing resource for digital photographers seeking workflow information and best practices for digital photography from the American Society of Media Photographers. dpBestflow.org is a site filled with information on color management, metadata, file storage and everything in between.
In the best practices section, there is a marvelous guide to keywording which discusses everything from hierarchical lists in Lightroom to purchasing keyword lists and controlled vocabulary.
There are instructions for creating metadata templates as well as information on copyright registration procedures.
I think I will be referring to this site a lot and I’m surprised I haven’t discovered it sooner.
From the New York Public Library collection.
Here are five things to talk about while eating turkey:
This is one of the coolest things ever - an export/import tool for a custom VRA Core metadata XMP panel. This tool, designed to be used with Adobe Bridge, allows you to export VRA Core metadata from images with existing metadata and even better, to import VRA metadata to a group of files from a .txt file.
The VRA Core metadata scheme has a very rich, robust, and relational set of elements so any tool that automates its application is extremely valuable. This site even has great videos to explain installation and use.
Here is a video I found recently that was a real hit in my recent presentation on managing image rights for creative agencies. It is very succinct and a must for anyone working with photography.
Here is a link to the organization that created this fine video - StockPhotoRights.com.
I just returned from a wonderfully informative time at the Henry Stewart Events DAM LA conference (#DAMLA). Here are more than five takeaways for those interested in managing digital assets:
Did you know you there is an app designed for accessing SharePoint on your iPad or iPhone? SharePlus is an app employed by companies like Skechers to remotely access their DAM content.
Check out this awesome digital collaboration and editing tool for photographers called GLOBALedit.
Do you need help selecting a DAM system? Materials from Theresa Regli and The Real Story Group can help your company pick the best tool.
Did you know you can customize the XMP info on Adobe files? The Marketing Store employs this in their creative workflow to effectively incorporate metadata for their DAM.
Are you craving more information on taxonomy and metadata? Check out this blog from Earley & Associates.
BONUS: The DAM Daily by DigitalAssetManagement.com features a lot of the topics from this conference.
DOUBLE BONUS: Here is an awesome article about a project featured at the conference - Tagasauris crowd-sourcing metadata for Magnum archive.
Yes indeed. Please email me at tracyguza@mac.com.
Yes please. You can email me at tracyguza.mac.com.
Turns out there are quite a few iPhone applications for reviewing photo metadata. I downloaded a handful of free apps listed below and most do precisely the same thing - display the EXIF data associated with the photos stored on your mobile device.
Here is an example of the screen in the Photo Metadata Viewer.
The British Association of Picture Libraries has a lot of useful information on their website. From explaining copyright infringement to a comprehensive image supplier list or category search, BAPLA offers adjunct tools to help image researchers locate material.
The BAPLA site also features up to the minute industry news and a useful toolkit for photographers containing legal templates and information on specific topics of interest like photographing buildings and property releases.
Here are five more things:
Switching gears from my usual metadata topics to Search Engine Optimization. I found a great series of courses related to using meta tags for SEO over on SEO Hacker.
Meta tags are the words that are hidden in your code, in the HTML <head> area. This is where you can put titles, descriptions and keywords that help crawlers locate your content.
There are three main things that a search engine crawler does with your meta tags. These are used for indexing, retrieval and ranking or precision.
Primarily, SEO experts use meta tags for things like accounting for misspellings, adding synonyms and also describing web pages with visual not text elements.
Read the whole thing to fully understand meta tags, proper use in SEO and the purpose of meta robots.
There was an interesting article in PDN (Photo District News) recently on several recent cases involving television networks ignoring photographers copyrights on images.
Increasingly, copyrighted images are showing up everywhere from Project Runway to the evening news without compensation being offered to the creators. One freelance journalist, Jason DeCesare of Philadelphia has sued CBS, NBC, Fox, Disney and Comcast for unauthorized used of his images.
“You have some low paid intern who does a Google search to find an image, and doesn’t care about the copyright,” he says. “I think they’re like the guy who jumps the subway turnstile. They’re hoping nobody’s watching them, and nobody’s going to catch them stealing.”
Indeed, copyright infringement is a serious matter and in the instant gratification world of the Internet, more and more people are appropriating images with the hope that the use flies under the radar.
Here are five more things.
While doing research for my two speaking engagements in November, I ran across a great article by Donna Slawsky on building a keyword library. The article discusses one of my favorite topics - aboutness in terms of identifying images - and also spells out clearly how and why to create a taxonomy for managing the keywords applied to digital assets.
The photo example supplied in the article and the findings displayed are accompanied by the astute observation that “people use different words to express similar ideas, concepts and even things.”
This is the main reason to create a taxonomy. Consistency in tagging assets begets consistency in retrieval.
Finally, the topic is summarized with some tips on creating the taxonomy - whether to take on the work in house or outsource to a freelance thesaurus developer. “Work on a thesaurus is never complete.”
Here are five things to amaze and delight you.
A couple weeks ago a post by Seth Maislin caught my attention. In it, Seth talks about data visualizations and the need for explanation or interpretation to really understand and use the information presented. In the same way, perusing a taxonomy to establish patterns or identify gaps is often a murky pursuit.
Seth brings up an interesting idea of adding audio to assist in recognizing relationships and interpreting search query logs.
Simple patterns can be represented visually, but multifaceted interpretations might be better served using sound harmonies or vibration frequencies.
While these ideas may at first glance seem a little wacky, think about your own challenges making sense of the glut of data gleaned daily. Although this post is a bit science fiction, isn’t everything lately?
Here is another great website design for what looks to be an amazing art museum. With collections ranging from Bauhaus to Pop Art to a prestigious photographic collection, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany has a well organized and aesthetically appealing site.
Of interest to library types is the Art and Museum Library. The collection of books, rougly 350K volumes, at the Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne covers the period from the Middle Ages to the present day with particular reference to publications relevant to museums.
