Weddings and controlled vocabulary
This weekend I (very, very carefully) travelled to NC for a wedding.
Highlights include catching up with many friends I have not seen since the last wedding we were all at, and being chatted up by no less than five different strangers my parents age about either 1. my Little Prince tattoo or 2. my sling – somehow bikers can sniff out their own kind, and I ended up saying the words “Tour de France”, which I avoid.
My librarian crew will be proud when I decided that we should create a controlled vocabulary so we could all search Flickr for wedding-weekend photos. Controlled vocabulary is the use of specific words in metadata – for instance, if I tagged my wedding photos ‘Geoff&Anne’, people I’m not already linked to would have to know that I used THAT SPECIFIC TERM to find the images.
Anybody else want to try their hand at defining ‘controlled vocabulary’? Now that we’re masters of our own tags, this concept is important.
Also, if you like scintillating cataoging news, you can learn about how activists like Sandy Berman are trying to get the Library of Congress to dump some of the more inflammatory subject headings that were acceptable at one time, but are no more.
I would point out (as I do this for a living), that Flickr people are really against applying controlled vocabs to Flickr, although they DO IT THEMSELVES. Hence I support this.
I have been to several parties that had signs that say “Please tag photos with this tag: “