https://www.flickr.com/groups/camerabag/
This is a link to the “What’s in your camera bag?” group on Flickr. Members can join and add a photograph of their camera bag with its contents laid out around it: the cameras, lenses, and other photographic equipment they own, their favorite film types, their cellphone, laptop, tablet, notebooks, and assorted personal effects. It’s the photographer’s equivalent of “What’s in your bag/purse?”
Like members of other groups on Flickr, they are basically making their own collection of information objects. In addition to content, they create metadata in the form of titles, descriptions, and tags. Each person writes as much or as little metadata as they like, which can lead to difficulties in searching for specific information. For example, the group currently has 2,382 photographs, yet only 252 have the “camera+bag” tag attached to it. As a result of the inconsistency in tagging, searching for photos like this outside of the group’s photostream is completely ineffective. The titles that people write are also inconsistent because, for instance, some might prefer the title “What’s in MY camera bag” over “What’s in YOUR camera bag?” Obviously, there are problems with the quality of user-generated metadata on the Internet, i.e., folksonomies, because there are no standards and no controlled vocabularies.
In “Setting the Stage,” Anne Gilliand addresses the bewildering variety of metadata standards by categorizing them according to the functions of metadata. There is no one standard that works well for everybody, so Gilliand argues that by understanding the various types of standards, as well as the attributes and characteristics of metadata, and the phases of its life cycle, information professionals will be able to choose the most appropriate standard or combination of standards for the needs of their institutions, collections, and users. Creating and maintaining metadata is extremely labor intensive and costly, so information professionals have to choose which standard(s) will cover their needs both now and in the future. The example of inconsistent tagging and titling in photos of camera bags and their contents is admittedly trivial and does not require high quality metadata, nor is it likely that casual Internet users will spend much effort improving their metadata, but it does illustrate a few of the problems that can be caused by low quality metadata. The importance of high quality metadata is much higher for museums, archives, libraries, etc., especially nowadays when the Internet has created a larger, more diverse audience for collections and repositories. Luckily, digital tools allow for the accommodation of multiple audiences that include scholars as well as less highly-trained students, teachers, and the general public.