PICTURE THIS


EAGLE FIRE


An F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft from the 391st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, deploys heat decoys during a combat patrol over Afghanistan Dec. 15, 2008. A caption, such as this one, may already be available when imagery is born digital. Captioning imagery from earlier eras after digitizing it can require research into multiple aspects of an image’s content. (DOD photo by SSgt Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force)


what’s


significant


for


the Naval Ship-


yard, what’s significant for the buildings, because the shipyard is part of a historic preservation site.” Nearly every one of the buildings that were documented in the glass plates is in the National Register of Historic Places, she noted.


Tat kind of research takes time, as well as archivists who know how to do it. Tere are many possible audiences for the images, and the archivist has to con- sider those different dimensions, not just researching to identify a street address, Hickey said.


To continue the example of the collo- dion glass plates, “What type of workers were they using, because this was the


84 Army AL&T Magazine


Jim Crow law era?” (From the 1880s into the 1960s, most states enforced segrega- tion through “Jim Crow” laws, named after a black character in minstrel shows. Te laws authorized states and cities to impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race in various environments.) “Some of those workers are in the picture. So there’s any number of degrees of his- tory you can go through, and it depends on how you want to describe it, which creates access points for those varying audiences,” Hickey said.


“At the end of the day, the image is owned by DOD. But it’s not just significant for the department—there’s also a social his- tory, there’s a political history, there’s civil


July–September 2014


rights history, too,” Hickey said. To make each image discoverable by any interested customer, the descriptive metadata have to include the full variety of tags.


Te more detail an image’s metadata has, the more accurate the search results. For example, a search for the word “bag” on Amazon.com produces more than 6.7 million results. Add to that search the words “women’s” and “leather” and the search results narrow to 858,611 results. Add the color “taupe,” and 6,295 items appear.


Tat’s because of a taxonomy, or organi- zational structure, of what Hickey calls


“controlled vocabulary,” which is another way of saying keywords. Tat controlled


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