Social Metadata Makes Media More Available

A few days ago, it was announced that the Library of Congress initiated a pilot project to put the government archive’s copyright-free photos on Flickr. The project, aimed towards gaining “a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the library and users of the Library’s collections,” is launching small, putting up a mere 3,000 photos (they’ve got millions) to test the waters.

Although we are unsure of how effective the project will be, it is needless to say that a government institution’s movement to leverage Web 2.0 phenomena to increase the online presence and general availability of information is an important one. Not only is the concept of a central location for valuable visual content compelling, but even more intriguing is how this media could then be shared and mashed-up through the millions of distribution channels on the web.

The metadata associated with the photos’ numerous distribution points could lead to new paths and networks that could dramatically enhance the image search process.The idea of a sea of metadata attached to the LOC’s photos inevitably begs the following question: Could social metadata eventually become a more effective search and data organization tool than traditional metadata?

For those of you who have not heard the term before, metadata, put simply, is data that is used to manage other data. If you have ever been to the library to check out a particular book, you may have tried to search for it by call number, author, title or keyword; those search items are the metadata you used to search for the actual data (the book) you were looking for.

Standardized metadata was institutionalized to help us successfully find, but is it possible that the arguably less reliable but slightly more instinctual social metadata such as tags could drive us to the content we want (as well as other relevant content) faster? Will humans be more comfortable and successful searching, finding and viewing within a standard system or one that is generated by their peers?

These are questions that will hopefully be answered in the near future. Until then, donate some of your procrastination time to a good cause!

Miles Lennon is an entrepreneur and innovation enthusiast.