News Photographers, Librarians, Tags, and Controlled Vocabularies: Balancing the Forces
Diane Rasmussen Pennington · Journal of Library Metadata · 2008
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.