News photographers, librarians, tags, and controlled vocabularies: Balancing the forces

Neal, Diane

Abstract

This article discusses a survey distributed to photojournalism professionals in order to determine their metadata preferences for photograph retrieval in an online archival system. Their top preferences included: named objects, specific events occurring in the photograph, browsing, and photographer-supplied keywords. Findings included problems with news photographers' metadata quality as well as librarians' inability to supply all the necessary metadata in this context. Additionally, it was found that current controlled vocabulary methods are not useful for the photojournalists' setting. New approaches to better facilitate search and retrieval of news photographs are suggested.

Citation

Neal, D. (2008). News photographers, librarians, tags, and controlled vocabularies: Balancing the forces. Journal of Library Metadata, 8(3), 199-219. https://doi.org/10.1080/19386380802373936

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Oct 11, 2008
• Publication Date: 2008
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2023
• Journal: Journal of Library Metadata
• Print ISSN: 1938-6389
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 199-219
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19386380802373936
• Keywords: image retrieval; tags; folksonomy; photojournalism; metadata; news libraries; digital archives; controlled vocabularies