Pictures into words
Brian G. Stewart · The Indexer · 2015
Subject access to images is a major issue for image collections. How well does current professional indexing represent the different levels of meaning in a photograph? How do indexers go about indexing an image? The first part of this article presents the results of a study investigating how current indexing represents the subject content of historic photographs. The second part reports on how professional indexers’ representation of subject content differs from the interpretations of taggers, and suggests a practical way that indexers can work with taggers to deal with the classic problem of resource constraints to enhance subject metadata and make photo collections more accessible.