OCTOBER 29: I D E A S . . .

Developing & Maintaining the Digital Image Collection

A recent quote from ARLIS-L: What interests me about folksonomy (which always sounds like something by Pete Seeger) is that in a way it shows how far the structured LC headings are from the way users actually search for or think about art. I worked with Margaret Depopolo of MIT when she was still at Yale as she put hundreds of x-refs into our card catalog, from the terms used by REAL city planners to the terms used by LC, because our architecture and planning clients couldn't deal with LC's 19th-century mindset.

An example of the Library of Congress's 19th century mindset: if you're searching for WWI you won't find anything under WWI or World War I. You have to look under "The Great War." And they still use "Eskimo."

• "real" terms vs. LC terms
• can the catalog be made more useful with innovative search strategies (like tagging)
• how would tagging OPAC entries change the way people search for images?
• when you change the way people look for things there will be a difference in what they will find

What does this have to do with collection development?

• what IS collection development if your collection is digital images?
• how does collection development differ: public library vs. a digital image archive? Similarities?

While a professionally executed catalog record may be very good, it is not necessarily understandable to its audience, and does not meet their needs. There are problems with the accessibility of museum collections and the terminology used to describe them. Can tagging lessen the "semantic gap" between curators/librarians and the general public? How does the relationship between the "enabled" tagger and the image change?

If people start searching for images using tags in addition to metadata, how does that change how you manange the collection? When you find that unexpected numbers of people search for images with certain tags do you develop your collection in that area? Would you buy more images depicting this term, more books about these images... How will new use patterns change your development strategies? What if patterns reveal interests that are not considered scholarly--do we opt out of developing in those areas? How do you manage these challenges to a museum's identity?

Other issues in Digital Image Libraries

• Once the images are online does the museum itself become less important?