The Quantum Archivist

In the first couple of Harry Potter books, the editions that were offered for sale in the United States were Americanized versions of the original works. What was a “jumper” in the original became a “sweater” in the US version. Lorries became trucks, boots became trunks, etc. Even the title of the first book was changed to suit the American audience. Once the books became a world-wide phenomenon, everyone was presumably familiar with Britishisms and the practice stopped I believe.

This is an interesting and possibly significant issue as we begin to develop our distributed cataloging project for the work of Semyon Fridlyand. Will we need to develop a semantic thesaurus of some kind that will help us bridge the gap between how we think about and name things and how others do? Adding to the dilemma is the fact that we will also be dealing with multiple languages and even multiple alphabets.

At the Web Wise conference last week, I heard Monika Hagendorn-Saupe of Europeana the EU’s aggregator of digital libraries. They are dealing with a huge alphabetic, semantic, and language issue and are developing a semantic search engine that you can test. I think it has promise and I’m hoping to find out more about the project and will report it here.

The concept of the semantic web has been around for a number of years, and for at least 10 years we’ve been hearing how the semantic web would change the way we use the web. The automatic linking of similar ideas, even if those ideas are not specifically indicated in the resource has been something of a holy grail for information professionals since the digital age began and we realized that it would be impossible to maintain metadata about digital content in the way that we did for analog content.

Finding a way out of our semantic/language/alphabet dilemma is going to be a bigger deal than we had originally thought when we come up with this idea.

A colleague of mine in the Art Gallery and I have been working on a project to bring to light about 15,000 images taken by the Soviet news photographer Semyon Fridlyand, who was active in middle part of the 20th century. The task of cataloging these images in the traditional way, that is by professionals, was of course very expensive. Since the collection has tremendous breadth, spanning multiple decades and subjects as diverse as war documentary photography, architecture, farming and agricultural technology, and ethnic dress and customs, it seemed impossible that we could assemble the cataloging expertise to do the collection justice. Faced with the choice of digitizing the photos or cataloging the photos, we chose to digitize them with only minimal metadata–not even a title in most cases, just an identification number.

The images are now available in a discovery system

Collection Discovery Tool

that was developed by a couple of first-rate programmers in the DU Library Systems office. The next step is to develop what we are calling a distributed metadata creation system that will make it possible to open cataloging up to nonprofessional volunteer experts. Inspired by the  success of the Steve project, we thought that it was possible to create valuable and valid metadata for our photographs from volunteers. However, we want to take the idea one step beyond simple tagging and develop a system that will create structured metadata–that is metadata that is relevant to particular concepts and “fields” such as “personal name,”  or “geographic location.” This way we can use the metadata to populate faceted search and discovery tools.

We are hoping to make contact with people in the former Soviet Union who were the subjects of these photos and engage them in the process of identifying them. In some cases, these photos are the only surviving visual record of this era for these people and places. Suggested metadata will be reviewed by a “panel of experts” who will work within the application to vet and approve metadata and add it to the “official” metadata for the object.

More postings on this exciting project to come.