Detail of a terazzo floor plaque, part of the installation "Another" by Barbara Kruger, 2008. Located in the atrium of the UCSD Price Center expansion. Part of the UCSD Stuart Collection
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Embedded metadata makes digital images independent, self-defining, sharable and flexible.
XMP, IPTC and Exif could be a great way to enhance the transfer of metadata, mostly between supplier and end user, but also between large institutional databases. Because these technologies have such widespread use and backing from camera manufacturers and software designers, they offer us a mechanism to share rich metadata that can be easily (automatically?) read and used.
Embedding metadata may also be a strategy to frontload metadata, especially administrative, rights, and technical, which will go towards assisting in long-term access or digital preservation. [Kari Smith]
These are a few thoughts about how users would benefit:
- Easily create albums by searching for an xmp tag then adding to album or bulk tagging set with a new tag.
- Share these tagged images with colleagues, students.
- XMP can be used by many different photo organization apps.
- Download and upload in a shared images wiki.
- Automate the process when a user contributes images to your institution’s managed collection (like the Flickr uplaoder)
Comments (3)
Karen Rollitt said
at 9:29 pm on Jul 29, 2009
Hi! There is another option and that is to embed the metadata within the digital object AND also store it outside of the digital object and provide a link to the digital object. Storing the metadata outside of the digital object creates further opportunities for the use of that metadata. An issue would be maintaining the metadata in two places but it maybe well worth the effort, Karen_NZ
GregReser said
at 11:03 am on Aug 12, 2009
This is could be a great to get the most out of image metadata. Are you aware of any institutions or private companies doing this? I wonder if news organizations or global photo agencies have processes that can synchronize external and embedded metadata in real time or at least daily (perhaps an OAI harvest every night?). Another idea would be to have an HTTP URI in the embedded metadata that could query the source database every time the image is opened by a user.
This topic is a great "advanced use case".
Steve Tatum said
at 3:51 pm on Aug 12, 2009
Our databases on Virginia Speedways and African-American recreational sites will have metadata in the image on spreadsheets. The spreadsheets will be uploaded to Luna Insight and also stored in the Virginia Tech digital archives with the images, where they will likely be converted to RDF/XML. Synchronization would be great, but transfer from spreadsheets to File Info Panels and vise versa will be manual.
The embedded metadata will be useful for our workflow. The researcher, Brian Katen, will have his files on a server and the catalogers will have access. Both Brian and the catalogers can add information to the images. The catalogers will synchronize the spreadsheets and Luna with the File Info panels.
In addition to automatic synchronization, a way to bulk export the RDF/XMP from the panels would be helpful. Is there a way to do that? It could avoid having to convert the spreadsheets.
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