2010/10/29 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
Hoi,
At the Europeana conference in Amsterdam they informed us about a museum
where they had not only the terminology used by professionals, they also had
labels that were added by the public. Analysis of the positive searches
showed that 85% of the searches where because of labels only 15% was because
of the official and correct keywords.
This result was discussed in several museums and many museums refused to
use labels because there was no truth in the labels. When you want to go
dublin core you are talking at best about the 15%.
We need to work on better usage not build another white elephant.
I'm not talking about eliminate the tags/labels, I'm talking about adding
(other) proper
metadata to our resources, if possible following standards. Tags are an
important part of it, but not all.
I mean, we can have both the better usage and more reliability.
I don't think that ignoring completely the history and results of
librarianship as a science/discipline
is a good idea, nor it is see the tags (of DC, for that matter) as a silver
bullet.
I'm not an expert, but all the digital libraries and repositories I know
focus a lot (maybe too much)
on metadata, because they guarantee retrievability (not talking about
museums here, mainly libraries and collection of texts). We can crowdsource
both more traditional metadata and loose but useful tags: why we have to
have just one?
Moreover, in the short term you are proably right, and the labels/tags will
serve as the main way for findig resources. But in the middle/long term you
will lose information, and digital preservation absolutely *needs* metadata.
How will you know about a picture if you just have a bunch of useful tags
about its content but not the source, creator, publisher, whatever?
Finally, a proper metadata management system (harvesting, disseminating,
ecc.) is just a way to *speak* with GLAMs and other projects, like
Europeana. Why not go in that direction?
Aubrey