Hi everyone, Not long ago on this list there was a thread about image annotation tools ([MCN-L] image annotation tools <001803.html> ). I have a related question and hope someone out there can point the way.
We have an archive of over 60,000 negatives representing the life work of the Pittsburgh photographer Teenie Harris. We are about to complete the second of two NEH Preservation and Access grants to catalogue and scan the collection and publish it online. There are countless people represented in the images, some of whom have been identified by researchers during the grant. There are many more to be identified and we will continue to look to the community to help. For the last few years we have provided a form-based tool as part of our on-line collection that can be used to submit image subject information to the museum. We are finding that the existing tools are an ineffective way to gather, store, and deliver this kind of information (e.g. we receive feedback like "the third person from the left in the second row, wearing the paisely jacket, is my uncle John Smith, who sang in the Baptist Church choir" which gets vetted and then recorded into the collections management system, awkwardly incorporated into the item's description and subject headings). What we envision is an image annotation tool along the lines of Flickr's annotations or Picasa Web Album's face labelling tool (which also links labels of the same person across multiple images and includes a facial recognition utility). This seems to be an ideal way to capture and deliver subject information from the community over the web. However, as far as I know, there is no way to capture the annotation data and store it locally, with the image, in our collections management system. Our collections management system does allow us to create multimedia records from URLs pointing to resources stored remotely, which could be part of a solution. But while we hope flickr and similar services will be there for eternity, we must have direct control over the information associated with the archive. Ideally the tool would also have the abilty to embed name authorities, like the Picasa face labelling system, that allows names to be controlled, edited, merged, etc. Anyone care to advise? Is there something out there already that we could adapt, or are we talking custom development? Will William Real Director of Technology Initiatives Carnegie Museum of Art 4400 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412.622.3267 412.622.3112 (fax) www.cmoa.org Join our email list for exhibition and event news: http://members.carnegiemuseums.org/email Member Exclusives! Insider e-newsletters-plus private previews, e-invites, free admission, and more when you join online: http://members.carnegiemuseums.org/SupportCMP
