Metadata, there is a porpoise
Jack Evans Porpoise Pool 1972
Originally uploaded by brettm8.
My use of the photo sharing website Flickr has changed a little over the more than two years I have been using it, and will no doubt change again. Currently the Incomparable Iris is the main subject of my photography efforts (maternity leave does that to you)
What hasn’t changed is my attitude to metadata - that is, data about data - I’m all for it, and here’s why. People find your photos if you title, describe and tag them appropriately. As an archivist, researcher and bod who generally cares about history, I’m happy about that.
Since the advent of Flickr stats, I know that it is photographs such as the sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace after the death of Diana in 1997, and photographs of the Berlin Wall before and just after it came down in 1989, that people want to see - moments in history. Mauritius as a subject, contemporary and historical, is another favourite with visitors to my photostream.
But there are other moments, on a smaller scale - social, familial - which Flickr can bring forth from boxes of old family photographs and negatives. Here is one of them:
Many years ago I told my friend Jo about photographs of myself with a porpoise and a seal, and she had some too. I put them on Flickr in January 2006, which drew forth similar shots from a friend in Canberra and voila - the Porpoise Pool group was born! I knew nothing about the subject, except that the photographs were taken on holiday in Queensland when I was about four (1970). My Canberra friend remembered that they were taken at the Jack Evans Porpoise Pool, Tweed Heads (later moving to Coolangatta) in Queensland. So we titled, tagged and described appropriately, and two years later we finally have a fourth member in our little group, Brett, who writes:
I was browsing around on Flickr and found a group devoted to photos of kids feeding the seal at the Porpoise Pool at Coolangatta. And I thought “I’ve got one of those!”
I found this a couple of years ago in a shoebox of old negatives my Mum gave me. I believe it was taken in December 1972, which would have been only a matter of weeks before the pool closed. I was 6 years old. I have clear memories of being called out of the crowd and wearing a bright red souvenir T-shirt from the pool afterwards, but I don’t remember actually feeding the seal.
The power of a good app and metadata. Weird how this battle is currently raging inside the Australian Museum. We have a new image management tool but no one seems to think it important to attach metadata to images - despite a rich tool to do so. If this proceeds, the system will fail :(
Did you catch up with the Flickr blog posts on The Commons project back in January? The Library of Congress have opened up some of their photographic collections to public tagging/describing through Flickr, with the aim of: “increas[ing] exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and … facilitat[ing] the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.
http://blog.flickr.com/en/2008/01/16/many-hands-make-light-work/
http://blog.flickr.com/en/2008/01/17/wow/
My colleague Jo was excited “to see the persistent LC URL included in the Description and linking to the LC metadata record” (I quote).
Why on earth don’t the Museum staff see this issue as important? It is hard to believe. A friend at the Australian War Memorial also brought this project to my attention, so I know that some Museums at least see the value.
Our new website will allow users and authors to tag any asset, and these will add to their richness etc.
My concern is less with the website than with the in-house image management system. We will be placing all master images here. Apparently we already have 92,000 images in the system after 3 months of use. I’d guess that less that 500 or so would have any form of detailed metadata.
I think the reason is to do with mindset - people are busy and do not see the benefit. It will be our job now to show them the benefits of good metadata practice. :)
My son went on a roller coaster ride at the Canberra Show last weekend and had his photo taken on it. Apparently it is quite common for the ride people to set up a camera at a particular place on the ride and take pix of everyone. Surely those photos are going to look very much the same - face after face captured with an absurd, grinning scream. I guess these will start turning up on places like Flickr too. But not as interesting as your porpoise photos Helen.
On metadata, the Australian War Memorial benefits from a practice going back to the very beginning of the organisation, 90 years ago, of providing detailed caption information for its images. There were interesting reasons for this enlightened practice, but would take too long to discuss here. Anyway, in the early 90s the Memorial started digitising its photographs and a few years later, when the internet came along, the Memorial was very well set up indeed to start loading images on to its website.
Other organisations have caught up, of course, But a search on, say, PictureAustralia, which brings up a mix of AWM and non-AWM images, often shows how rich the AWMs metadata is, compared to others.
Amazing. I am never sure how to tag my photos and consequently I don’t. This post is inspiring though.
I agree. Meta data is very powerful and I also try to include a rich set. I have just been contacted by Auburn council who want to use photos in one of their publications.
Thanks for the pic, Helen, and the nostalgia trip it gave me. I also have faint memories of being a 5 or 6 year-old going on family trips to some of the porpoise/sea-lion places and other zoo-like attractions that flourished on the Gold Coast area back in the 70s. :) When I was that age, we lived a long way inland in Blayney, a country town in the Bathurst-Orange area, so going to one of the aquarium places on Gold Coast was even more of a big deal. So was the fact there were nearby ice-cream ‘palaces’ that offered 2 doz. or more flavours. Awesome! :)
Back then, my parents had some friends who ran a place called ‘Bird Life Park’(later sold or closed), so that was ‘on the holiday list too, as was Sea World, which my sister and I insisted our dad’s mother took us to on school holiday outings when we visited her in Kingscliff.
cheers,
Tim in Canberra