Art Slide Drawer Photo Credit: Night Owl City CC2.0
Ancient History
Prior to the development of digitization techniques and the internet, image collections, typically slides, were organized by individuals who used the slides for teaching, or by individual holding institutions, often in unique or idiosyncratic ways. The systems for organizing these slides were relatively simple and had limited access points. While there were common elements, there were many differences, both in the character and depth of the organization.
Recent History
Since digitization of images emerged radical changes have occurred. Many associations involved in this areas, of professionals who handle these collections, of institutions who house them (including colleges, universities, museums, and archives), and of researchers who use them, turned their attention to the ways that digitization can be harnessed. Individually and collectively they have developed planning procedures for large-scale conversion of analog images to digital format, systems for organizing and managing these images, websites for sharing them, and protocols for exchanging metadata. There are a host of open source and proprietary tools supporting these many efforts.
The ability to actually retrieve and use these heritage images ultimately depends on metadata. Andrew Wray put it well when he said that metadata is the “invisible glue that hold the system together and makes the massive amounts of digital information usable.” In the case of images, access is even more dependent on metadata. Text files, even if not indexed, tagged in XML, or otherwise cataloged can always be subjected to a full text search. Images, on the other hand, are basically useless without added metadata. While direct (or content-based) image search technologies, which use complex algorithms to determine the subject matter of digital images, exist this technology is still in its infancy, and there is general agreement that it could never replace the detail and scope of individual cataloging for heritage images. The creation of meaningful metadata is thus one of the chief challenges facing heritage image collections. This is a challenge for both technology and for the development and management of human resources.
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