I’m not completely sure how to start this post. First, I guess with thanks to John Fudrow, else it would have been even longer before I found out about this development (how did I miss this?). My original title for this post was LOC + Flickr = Interesting, but then I saw that the LibrarianInBlack already used a similar approach (LoC + Flickr = happy land), so I decided to change.
Why do I mention this? I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m still procrastinating, as I’m not sure how to proceed with this post. Do I simply sit back, grin, and celebrate the wonder and joy of seeing such an established institution, the Library of Congress, make a bold leap into the Library 2.0 realm…or do I perhaps analyze the benefits/drawbacks of such a move.
How about this: I’m smiling right now and just enjoying it. You too can smile, go read about the pilot project, view the photos, contribute tags, and forget all about my post….or, you can come back and read on for my analysis:
For the pilot project, the LoC placed 3100 images on Flickr, tagged simply with one phrase (“Library of Congress”) and two machine tags. If nothing else, this project should provide a wealth of information to librarians/curators/archivists on the benefits/drawbacks of using social software for information retrieval/discovery. The two most common questions they’ve been getting at the LoC blog are:
“When will you upload even more photos?” Or, “What will you do with all of this information?”
This is amazing to me…the LoC provides, through its own online catalog, access to these 3,100 images plus about 1 million others, yet it seems that a large number of Flickr users (people, who, theoretically like pictures) do not even know about this vast collection. IMO, this definitely illustrates the need for librarians/curators/archivists to find ways of meeting potential users in their environments. It is fine and good to talk about the problems associated with doing this, but if we don’t find ways around those problems, or solutions to them, our resources are going to remain seriously underused or, worse yet, unused.
If you’re reading this and wondering just what problems might there be with this particular project (and similar ones), here’a short list of concerns that pop into my mind:
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the information organization/retrieval issues relating to the conflict between the traditional, specialist-applied subject term approach and the user-applied tagging approach
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CIPA (Children’s Internet Protection Act) issues
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Complaints against the joining of the LoC and a publically traded company
I’ll start with the final point above…here’s a comment left on the LoC’s blog (I’m going to leave this point alone for now, as I haven’t given it much thought other than that is an interesting point):
For a little more information about the issues with CIPA blocking access to the Library of Congress pictures on Flickr, please read Beth Wellington’s post at the Writing Corner.
Now, in regards to the tagging/subject term dilemma, I have a few things to note: Take the picture I posted above. When I viewed its Flickr page, 68 tags had been applied to it. Much of information organization/retrieval/discovery relates to an object’s place in the world, both physical (if we’re talking about a physical thing), and conceptual. Since they do not have a physical form, we can store digital items in multiple places, as is evidenced by the number of tags applied to the image above. But who determines what an item is about, the categories/tags/subject-terms that can/should be applied to it? Traditionally, specialists: librarians, subject-specialists, curators, etc. With social tagging the users decide on something’s aboutness. This has numerous benefits and drawbacks. For this post, I’ll focus on one of the problems with tagging as an information retrieval system :
If I wanted to look at all of the pictures in this collection relating to harvesting and I was forced to use the tags applied to this photo, I could click on harvest and (when I actually did this) find 31 results. Great, right? Well, if you look at the other tags applied to this photo, we find:
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Farm – 130 results
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Field – 103 results
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Crop – 16 results
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Produce – 11 results
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Agriculture – 41 results
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Farmers – 36 results
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Farming – 43 results
I might need to look through all of the above tags (and more) to find all of the pictures dealing with the concept of harvest. In a system where a specialist looks at an image, decides what it is about, and finds the controlled term(s) (in this case harvest) for a particular concept(s) and applies it(them), you only have to look in one place or search using only one term.
So, what am I saying? Well, I’m not really sure. I still think this project is cool and eagerly am watching its development…but we still all need to do some thinking about information retrieval in an online environment. My next post should probably be about the benefits of tagging/social bookmarking and the problems with controlled-vocabularies, just to confuse the matter even more.
