Ethan

The Biodiversity Heritage Library has pushed about 75k of our images to our
Flickr stream and we do machine tagging .  At least 2 machine tags are
automatically added to every image when we upload them to Flickr - an id
and a page url for the original source for the image in the BHL portal
e.g.

   - bhl:page=42123174<http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/tags/bhl%3Apage%3D42123174/>
   - dc:identifier=http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/42123174<http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/tags/dc%3Aidentifier%3Dhttpbiodiversitylibraryorgpage42123174/>




We also encourage users to add machine tags for the species names of the
plants and animals depicted in the images in order for those images to be
more efficiently searched by users and also for our images to be
automatically upload to species pages within the Encyclopedia of Life.
More info here
http://ala13.ala.org/files/ala13/Flickr%20Tagging%20Process_0.jpg

Unfortunately machine tagging the content of an image is very much a manual
process and requires humans.  We don't have the staff to do this ourselves
so we have so far relied on crowdsourcing and have held some Flickr tagging
parties towards this effort.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/05/partying-with-bhl-tagging-flickr-images.html

We would love to hear other libraries efforts to add machine tags to their
Flickr images.

Trish Rose-Sandler
Data Analyst, Biodiversity Heritage Library



On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> There is an enormous body of open photographs contributed by a myriad of
> libraries and museums to flickr.  Is anyone aware of any efforts to
> associate machine tags with these photos, for example to georeference with
> geonames machine tags, tag people with VIAF ids, or categorize with LCSH
> ids?  A quick Google search turns up nothing.  There's a little bit of this
> going on with Pleiades ids for ancient geography (
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades%3A*/), but there's enormous
> potential in library-produced images.
>
> I think it would be incredibly powerful to aggregate images of manuscripts
> created by Thomas Jefferson (VIAF id: 41866059) across institutions that
> have digitized and uploaded them to flickr.
>
> Ethan
>