Conduit, N. and P. Rafferty, (2007) ‘Constructing an Image Indexing Template for the Children's Society: Users' Queries and Archivists' Practice’, Journal of Documentation, 63(6), pp.898-919. (original) (raw)

Requests for information from a film archive: a case study of multimedia retrieval

Multimedia retrieval is a complex and to some extent still unexplored area. Based on a full year of e-mail requests addressed to a large film archive this study analyses what types of information needs real users have and how these needs are expressed. The findings include that the requesters make use of a broad range of need attributes in specifying their information needs. These attributes relate to the production, content, subject, context and screening of films. However, a few attributes – especially title, production year and director – account for the majority of the attribute instances. Further, as much as 43 per cent of the requests contain no information about the context that gives rise to the request. The current indexing of the archived material is restricted to production-related attributes, and access to the material is, thus, frequently dependent on the archivists' extensive knowledge of the archived material and films in general. Introduction Most work on information retrieval assumes that the stored material is textual. However, a substantial portion of the material held in archives and other collections is non-textual or multimedia. For example, newspapers have image databases, the police have text and photo archives of previously convicted persons, television stations archive their programmes, manufacturing companies have databases with product documentation including computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, and film archives store films, newsreels and other film-related material to preserve cultural heritage and enable future research. Furthermore, increasing amounts of multimedia material is made available on the Web. To benefit from these masses of material we need techniques for retrieving the comparatively few items that are relevant to a specific person in a specific situation. The present study seeks to inform the design of such techniques by analysing how users of a national film archive express their information needs: " What is included in their requests and what is notably absent? "

Flickr and democratic indexing: Dialogic approaches to indexing

Aslib Proceedings, 2007

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to examine three models of subject indexing (i.e. expert-led indexing, author-generated indexing, and user-orientated indexing); and to compare and contrast two user-orientated indexing approaches (i.e. the theoretically-based Democratic Indexing project, and Flickr, a working system for describing photographs). The approach to examining Flickr and Democratic Indexing is evaluative. The limitations of Flickr are described and examples are provided. The Democratic Indexing approach, which the authors believe offers a method of marshalling a “free” user-indexed archive to provide useful retrieval functions, is described. The examination of both Flickr and the Democratic Indexing approach suggests that, despite Shirky’s claim of philosophical paradigm shifting for social tagging, there is a residing doubt amongst information professionals that self-organising systems can work without there being some element of control and some form of “representative authority”.

Providing subject access to images: a study of user queries

1998

This paper describes a study of user queries conducted at two historical photographic collections—the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh. Patron requests were analyzed in order to determine which types of subject terms and attributes of images are used most often in requests for photographs. Basic categories of terms were created, and the number of requests utilizing each category of term was tallied.