[Metadatalibrarians] IPTC metadata

[Kris]

Hi Kristin,
We have created an in-house image metadata standard, which is a blend
of IPTC, MIX, XMP and JPEG2000, and even PREMIS. (We even examined DC,
but the elements from DC we cared about were covered in the other
standards, if that makes sense). I led that work, with extensive
consultation with photographers, clients, web folks, as well as rights
management folks in my department. (Personally, I am the metadata
coordinator and information architect/taxonomist.) We agreed on this
particular set of metadata, even if it does differ from existing image
metadata standards out there - embedded or otherwise. We started with
an extensive review of the ones I listed, and ended up with a little
bit of all of them. If pressed, we could export easily enough (and now
because I said that, I've likely jinxed myself).

We use the embedded metadata from images, which drive many of our
dates for example (and we have alot of dates in our DAMS (!)).

We have tried to create a standard for embedded image metadata, ie. we
have a departmental standard for image metadata, but many of the
images we receive are from outside sources, so when we receive those
images, we have to rely on what we get (more on that in a second).

The result is my organization's image standard is an overlapped set of
metadata that contains the embedded metadata from the source
(photographer), descriptive metadata about the image, and
business-related "extra" metadata (business owner, for example) and
some rights metadata that we use to manage the assets in our DAMS and
CMS. (The CMS is based on DC, but also has its own amended flavour).

The embedded image metadata is used from what photographers provide -
many of which are contracted so sometimes we receive different
metadata than what we expect to receive. (I can go into the terms of
contracting, and what the photographers are to provide to us, but
that's not particularly my area, but I do have some idea about what
they are supposed to provide with the images.) We also try to
catalogue the images if metadata is missing - that descriptive
metadata part - and if it can be found; for legacy collections, for
example. And the two parts form our image metadata standard. Both
parts are searched, the embedded part as well as the descriptive part,
so we add things like subject terms (controlled vocabs) and free-text
keywords, team responsibilities, etc. The DAMS is a full asset system,
so we needed a way to not only ingest metadata provided by
photographers on the images they took, but also add business-related
image management function. I think we did a pretty good job.

I'd be happy to talk more about our systems offlist, just let me know.

Cheers,
Kristina Aston
Metadata Coordinator
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada




On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Kristin E. Martin<kmarti at uic.edu> wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone on the list has experience with IPTC (International
> Press and Telecommunications Council) metadata.  I've been talking with a
> colleague here who is a professional photographer and uses it as part of her
> professional work, and suggested the library use the standard for its
> descriptive metadata  for image digitization projects.  The advantages: the
> metadata would be imbedded within the image itself, and many image software
> programs are compatible with IPTC metadata standards.  I am not terribly
> familiar with the standard and wonder about it being developed for a
> specific purpose versus (press images) versus the more general purpose of
> library digital image collections. 5 of the elements map to Dublin Core.
>  Has anyone out worked with the standard?  What has your experience been?
>
> I also wonder, in a more general context, about the advantages of embedding
> metadata within an image.  I'm more used to thinking of metadata as residing
> along side the digital object, particularly with descriptive metadata.  Most
> digital library programs keep the two separate and link them up. I suppose
> you can always extract the embedded metadata for searching purposes.  I'm
> curious as to anyone's thoughts and feelings on embedded metadata.
>
> I realize this is sort of vague, but I'm just starting to consider what to
> do with this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kristin
>
> --
> Kristin E. Martin
> Metadata Librarian
> Catalog Department (MC 234)
> 2-390 Richard J. Daley Library
> University of Illinois at Chicago
> 801 S. Morgan
> Chicago, IL  60607
> 312-413-5052
> 312-413-0424 (Fax)
> kmarti at uic.edu
>
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