News Photographers, Librarians, Tags, and Controlled Vocabularies: Balancing the Forces

摘要

This article discusses a survey distributed to photojournal-ism professionals in order to determine their metadata preferences for photo-graph 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 photojournal-ists' setting. New approaches to better facilitate search and retrieval of news photographs are suggested.