A Living Archive

• Located within the Bronx Zoo• Library was founded in 1909• Archives was established in 1979• Most of the archives are housed in

the original library building• Collections include print and

digital resources on conservation, veterinary medicine, animal behavior, and other wildlife topics

• Photo Archives & Digital Asset Management Internship

• Responsible for three projects:1. Digitization of Department of

Tropical Research historical photos2. Digital asset management (DAM)

of new image collections3. Assessment of new metadata

vocabularies & user evaluation survey

• Widen is the DAM system used by WCS Library & Archives

• Institutional users can use Widen to access digital images by category or keyword search

• Metadata is added to digital image assets using Adobe Bridge

• Created and provided a survey to 50 institutional users

• Suggested 20 possible terms asking whether or not they are useful for searchability

• Received and analyzed 23 responses

• Terms suggested by the site supervisor and me performed well

• Users provided valuable comments

• Find the frequency of vocabulary terms in online resources

• Evaluate media that is specific to only animals

• Used 20 terms coming from a combination of the user survey, comments from survey responses, and my own choices not in survey

• Collect data from 12 online resources containing a large number of animal photographs and then normalize and find trends

• Terms from user comments performed very well

• Zoo-affiliated resources had very different results from resources not affiliated with zoos

• Conservation, baby, male and female, group, keeper, and family were the highest-scoring terms

• Many terms scored well in some resources but poorly in others

• The context of the resources used makes a large difference in the results

• Metadata vocabularies made for the correct subject but in the wrong context might not be useful to users

• This study does not take into account whether terms are subjective or otherwise difficult to use in metadata vocabularies

• Since user-provided terms did quite well, it was immensely helpful to perform the user survey before gathering this data

• The process of creating a useful metadata vocabulary requires a multi-faceted approach

• The users of a collection are the best source for ideas and insight into metadata term selection

To review the complete methodology and results of this study, visit: http://zoocabulary.wordpress.com

Images:•Title Slide (Raccoon)http://www.alaska-in-pictures.com/northern-racoon-photographer-texas-hill-country-usa-10555-pictures.htm•Practicum Information Slide (Bronx Zoo)http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Stavenn_Bronx_Zoo_00.jpg

Sources:•Attig, J., Copeland, A., & Pelikan, M. (2004). Context and meaning: The challenges of metadata for a digital image library within the university. College & Research Libraries, 65 (3), 251-261. Retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/content/65/3/251.full.pdf•Breitbach, B.M., Tracey, R., & Neely, T.Y. (2002). Managing a digital collection: The Garst photographic collection. Reference Services Review, 30 (2), 124-142.•Kandel, S., Abelson, E., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A., & Theobald, M. (2008). PhotoSpread: A spreadsheet for managing photos. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. Retrieved from http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/857/1/2007-38.pdf•Leyssen, M. H., Traub, M. C., van Ossenbruggen, J., & Hardman, L. (2012). Is it a bird or is it a crow? The influence of presented tags on image tagging by non-expert users. CWI Tech 2012. Report INS-1202, CWI. Retrieved from http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/20690/20690D.pdf•Schreiber, A. Th., Dubbeldam, B., Wielmaker, J., & Wielinga, B. (2001). Ontology-based photo annotation. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16 (3), 66-74. Retrieved from http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/papers/Schreiber01a.pdf