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Flickr Commons: A great idea, but…
Let me make this clear right off the bat: I think the idea of Flickr and the U.S. Library of Congress collaborating on a project to display historical photos is a fantastic idea. As described by Read/Write Web and by the Library itself (and by Flickr), it involves thousands of old pictures that are free from copyright being made available through Flickr. Great idea. The more people who get to see images from their cultural history, the better.
The other aspect of the project — the part where the Library of Congress asks people to add tags to the photos to help classify them — I’m not so crazy about. Don’t get me wrong, I think “crowdsourcing” of information can be a very powerful thing, since it lets companies make use of expertise that may be located in hard-to-reach or undiscovered places. And if the Library and Flickr were specifically asking old people or photographers to tag the photos, I would be a lot more interested.
The problem with letting anyone tag a photo is that their ability to do so properly is completely unknown. To take one example from the Flickr page, there’s a shot of a guy wearing old automobile goggles, behind the wheel of an old car — and people have tagged it “goggles,” “wheel” and “man.” So far, so good. However, the photo is identified as “Burman,” and someone has tagged it “burnam.” That’s not only unhelpful, it’s wrong. Is someone going to go through and check all the tags?
It’s possible that only people with a real interest in old photos will be bothered to cruise the Library collections and tag them, in which case this might be a self-regulating problem. I hope so. As you can see if you read the comments here — some from people whose opinions I respect — they seem to think I’m off-base, and that the data collected from those user-submitted tags will be worthwhile from a number of perspectives. But it seems I’m not the only one wondering about its utility.
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As you probably already know, organizations like the Library of Congress, wire services and stock photo agencies currently use controlled vocabularies ( highly structured and deep taxonomies) to classify the photos. This is a tried-and-true way of cataloguing photos (and other media) for easy retrieval, assuming that the user searching for photos has a basic understanding of how the photos are organized and structured in the first place.
But if the person searching for a photo is not a pro (photo editor, art director, researcher, librarian, etc.) or already familiar with the vocabulary structure used to catalog a set of pictures, they'll probably opt to use a free text or natural language querry (aka google it) to try and find the photos.
By putting the collection of photos on Flickr, the Library of Congress has a unique opportunity to poll a wide range of people and get feedback on how they see or identify the photos through tags and comments using a free-form, non-controlled cataloguing method. And the Library can use those insights to perhaps improve their structured cataloguing and indexing process and terms to enhance search and findability in their picture collections.
So I think that this opportunity to see how non-pros identify the Library photos on Flickr far outweighs the potential for (likely small) errors in the tagging process. And having non-pros doing the tagging is exactly what you'd want here.
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If the collective tags are aggregated correctly, they could provide quality information, competing the data experts could provide.
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Now, in your example with the typo, I really disagree with you, because typos a) happen all the time; and, b) often cause content to go undiscovered as the result of the searcher's typo and the content's correct spelling.
Tags with typos come in handy, more often than you'd think.
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I suppose Flickr could create a certification level for tagging by professional taggers, but I don't think that's going to be necessary.
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While it's important to recognize incorrect tags, its also wonderful to be able to see exactly what is wrong. If enough people mis-label a car or a piece of equipment, we've just gained valuable knowledge (some people think this isn't a ford at all, but a chevy) .
It's very meta, in a way, but its interesting nevertheless.
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