Digital image description: a review of best practices in cultural institutions

Purpose - This paper aims to present the results of the first phase of a research project aiming to develop a bilingual taxonomy for the description of digital images. The objectives of this extensive exploration were to acquire knowledge from the existing standards for image description and to assess how they can be integrated in the development of the new taxonomy. Design/methodology/approach - An evaluation of 150 resources for organizing and describing images was carried out. In the first phase, the authors examined the use of controlled vocabularies and prescribed metadata in 70 image collections held by four types of organizations (libraries, museums, image search engines and commercial web sites). The second phase focused on user-generated tagging in 80 image-sharing resources, including both free and fee-based services. Findings - The first part of the evaluation showed that each resource presented comparable information for the images or items being described. Best practices and implementation proved to be largely consistent within each of the four categories of organizations. The second part revealed two trends: in image-upload systems, there was a virtual absence of mandated structure beyond user name and tags; and in stock photography resources, the authors encountered a hybrid of taxonomies working in combination with user tags. Originality/value - The analysis of best practices for the organization of digital images used by indexing specialists and non-specialists alike has been a crucial step, since it provides the basic guidelines and standards for the categories and formats of terms, and relationships to be included in the new bilingual taxonomy, which will be developed in the next phase of the research project.