La fotografía en el contexto del cambio

Héctor Guillermo Alfaro López, Graciela Leticia Raya Alonso, Héctor Guillermo Alfaro López, Graciela Leticia Raya Alonso

• Publisher: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas y de la Información
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9786073017084
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

La cotidiana sobreproducción social de fotografias nos remite a la necesidad de que una parte de imágenes de la totalidad que se pierde en la espuma de los días se preserve. Preservación que implícitamente sea un reducto de recuperación de la memoria; que una parte de información fotográfica pueda ser conservada por su relevancia social. Lo que nos conduce directamente a las ciencias documentales, entre las que tiene lugar la bibliotecología, cuyo sentido y objetivo es precisamente la preservación, organización y difusión de la información registrada, entre la que por supuesto se encuentra la información visual. Ahora bien, esto que de primera instancia parece obvio, como es el hecho de que la información visual en cualquiera de sus soportes de imágenes son objetos de suyo connaturales al quehacer de tales ciencias, presenta algunos problemas. Por ejemplo, en el caso específico de la bibliotecología, que por ancestral tradición ha hecho de la información bibliográfica su objeto central de trabajo, se enfrenta en la actualidad a diversas, cambiantes y distintivas expresiones informativas como es el caso de la información visual y, más en particular, a la información fotográfica, por lo que está siendo llevada a reconstruir su visión de la información así como de los parámetros de organización de la misma. La bibliotecología al ser una ciencia, por su propia condición, estructuradora del orden ha buscado desde el principio ofrecer un marco y procedimientos técnicos para organizar la información fotográfica, en algunos casos de manera aproximada, en otros insatisfactoriamente, pero la tarea continúa, como queda de manifiesto en esta obra, cuyo título para esta edición es ya de por si ilustrativo del momento en que este soporte informativo se encuentra La fotografía en el contexto del cambio: retos y perspectivas.

Collaborative images indexing: a Portuguese case study on Flickr

Leonor Calvão Borges

Patrícia de Almeida

Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

Introduction

With the advent of web 2.0, in the era of digital images and massive digitalization of content, both physical descriptions and subject indexing of images represents a major challenge for memory institutions. In fact, the development of new services and forms of communication with users through social platforms represents not only a new way of interacting but also a strategy of transforming them into users or communities “content providers” (Flinn, 2010).

O’Reilly (2005) points out that the great change from web 1.0 to web 2.0 is to allow collective intelligence to be harnessed through an architecture of participation, enabling a structure of products and services that depend on the participation of users, creating participatory networks, which add content, often in the form of tags, in what is called collaborative indexing. For Peters (2007), web 2.0 services are focused on communication and exchange of resources between users, presenting a classification of services, technology and licenses, where social software stands out.

At the beginning of this century and in this web environment, important projects of memory institutions of several countries occur, which, through the digitalization and availability of their images in social platforms, obtained a great adhesion of new and different users. This resulted in an often specialized collaboration, with obvious benefits for the description of contents of these institutions (Rafferty & Hidderley, 2007; Edmunson-Morton, 2009; Springer, 2009; Rorissa, 2010; Stewart, 2013).

Thus, this qualitative case study aims to verify the presence of Portuguese municipal memory institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) on Flickr and to check the level of interest and interactivity of the general public, in the scope of creation collaborative knowledge of images.

After a review of the scientific literature on methods and good practices of indexing images, the study focuses on the understanding of folksonomies as an emerging phenomenon of these technologies, making a critical analysis of its advantages and disadvantages when applied to the description or indexing of images. The results show that the presence of Portuguese municipal memory institutions on Flickr is almost nil.

Images: from concept to information
representation

The image, “a graphic, plastic or photographic representation of two or even three dimensions of one or several objects or forms in an adequate support” (Faria & Pericão, 2008: 638), is undoubtedly a means of transmission and communication with remote origins, moreover, prior to written communication. The existence of visual documents in the memory institutions has been increasing exponentially, leading to a reflection on its conservation and dissemination.

In the archives, the existence of non-textual documentation (photographs or architectural drawings, for example) appears in the nineteenth century, despite its lack of documentary treatment as an imaginary document until more recent years. Public libraries, as Alvim states, “were surprised by image and sound” (1997: 138) in the late 1980s. Also, museums have evolved in the way of developing their photographic collection, far beyond inventory photography.

The literature review here is part of conceptual problems on how to describe in text an image (an image with words), theorization about the documentary analysis of an image, strategies of description and establishment of analysis grids for extraction of terms of indexation.

Sara Shatford’s article (1986) is generally con...