Library of Congress & Flickr Community: Collaborative Organization
During today’s 12-1pm discussion the group talked about Flickr and how users tag photos, and what that means for information organization. Can Flickr users be considered professional information organizers?
After class I started to review my own tagging habits, and searched for any efforts by [insert your favorite authoritative information organization body] to leverage the Flickr community. I quickly happened upon a short article on the Library of Congress website [here] from earlier this year. From the article:
“…the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…”
As a pilot project the LOC created a photostream [here] and invited Flickr users to tag and comments the photos. I looked through a handful of photos in the stream and found an wonderfully uninteresting one:
Flickr: Train and several sets of railroad tracks in the snow, Massachusetts
Below the photo you can see the LOC’s internal metadata, including the photographer, (approximate) date, subjects (aka “categories”), and call number. To the right of the photo you can see the tags assigned to the photo, some by the LOC and some apparently by Flickr members.
Now here’s where I think it gets interesting – check out the comment by Flickr member billreidy:
Appears to be the New Haven Railroad’s Middleboro, MA yard. View is looking NNE from the Route 28 overpass toward the Middleboro station (barely visible in the background in the top center of photo, to the left of the water tank) and toward Boston. Tracks on the far right head to Cape Cod. Tracks in the foreground head toward Taunton, MA.
Who at the LOC would have known that information? Maybe somebody, but it would have taken a lot of work (and money).
A few minutes of searching Google for information on Bill Reidy and we find that he (well, probably him – how many Bill Reidy’s are out there?) is/was the area chapter historian for the National Railway Historical Society. The chapter covers the area where the photograph was taken 60+ years ago!
Can Flickr users organize information as well as a “professional” information organizer? In this case, I’d definitely say yes. Perhaps better, though you could argue that Bill’s a “professional” railroad enthusiast.
Now the question is – how do we convert Bill’s narrative description into structured data or tags?
A Couple of Relevant Lectures:
[6] Metadata and Metadata Standards
[14] Social/Distributed Categorization