Dates: March
2-27, 2015
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: $175
Students in this course will explore the many
ways in which photographic images are described and interpreted by both people
and computers. The goal of the course is to broaden the non-specialist
cataloguer’s ability to describe the subject content and material qualities of
photographs, and to provide a greater understanding of current standards and
approaches to image resource access. The course will begin with exercises aimed
at helping students to identify and describe different photographic media and
common deterioration problems. Students will develop an image record using
either the VRA Core Categories or Dublin Core, and will apply authority data to
these records using specialized controlled vocabularies such as the Thesaurus
for Graphic Materials and the Getty Vocabularies. Class discussions will focus
on questions of data completeness and complexity, theories regarding image
iconography and interpretation, and the feasibility of using crowd-sourced
descriptive information, including social tagging and folksonomies. The outcome
of this course will be a greater understanding of the varied approaches to
describing visual content through written language, giving students the skills
to incorporate flexibility into the cataloguing structure.
