What is good keywording?

What is good keywording and how do you achieve it? A summary of my recent talk at the Imperial War Museum in London.
My sincere apologies for taking so long to post this article. Life’s been very busy with new and exciting projects in all the main areas - controlled vocabularies, keywording and training. Admittedly, a big chunk of my spare time has also been taken up by my passion for triathlons - it’s my first season and I have just completed the first couple of races.

One of the many things I have been occupied with was a talk I gave at an ACE (Association for Cultural Enterprises) seminar for the Cultural Heritage sector at the Imperial War Museum in London. It was a very interesting day and the other excellent talkers gave a lot of food for thought. Here’s a summary of mine:

Images are used for different purposes by different people and the original context, although important, is only one way of approaching visual content. To make images accessible, keywords are imperative. When I was preparing for this presentation there was a particular painting I wanted to use but, alas, I didn’t remember who painted it or when it was painted. The only thing I could remember was that it depicted young boys at a beach playing with home-made toy boats, sunlight flickering on the surface of the water with some large stones in the foreground. I searched for ‘boys’, ‘Finnish painting’ ‘sea’, ‘traditional’, ‘playing’ and so on but I simply could not find this image. After an hour, I stumbled across it by pure chance. Had I been a potential customer wanting to use the image, say, for a book cover this would have been a lost sale. The point I want to make here is that images, particularly those in a specialist area such as fine art, archeology, architecture and music should be approached from a non-academic point of view if a wider audience is to be reached. Recording only the title, artist’s name and the year the object was created may serve well the experts but simply isn’t enough for someone like me who can only remember a few random aspects of the object. Therefore diversity is a critical aspect of good keywording.

The second component of good keywording is consistency. This often means having a controlled vocabulary which comes in many shapes and forms. A controlled vocabulary can dramatically improve search results as it stabilises and disambiguates terms. Only one term is chosen for keywording when many variations are available (candy or sweets, car or automobile?) and the meaning of ambiguous terms are clearly defined (Paris Hilton or Paris the capital, pool as in a billiards game or a swimming pool?). When adding keywords to images you will also need to ensure that the terms are always applied in the same way. For example, should ‘Transportation’ be applied to all images that have to do with transport related things or should it be more narrowly defined only to cover images which show things or people actually being transported from place to place. These decisions are part and parcel of image findability and it is also what makes the keywording challenging and fascinating!

The third and last characteristic of good keywording is relevancy. Understand your audience and how they search images. What do they expect to see when searching for a particular term? One of the most common mistakes people new to keywording make is that they apply too many keywords to images in the hope of increasing sales. Nothing frustrates a picture searcher more than irrelevant search results and having to scan through hundreds of pages to find that one relevant image. Be accurate yet brave enough to leave small, peripheral things out (unless, of course, this is what your users want).

That’s it for now. I hope you have enjoyed this article and that you found it worth the wait! Please keep checking my website every so often, I’ve got some new features in the pipeline and I hope to release them later this year.