Title metadata for unnamed photographs

A classmate recently blogged about some of his struggles tackling the Title metadata element for use with the football photographs repository we will be indexing. The images in question were photographs taken from University of Alabama football games during the 1975 and 2009 seasons. Now the Title element would normally seem to be one of the easier tags to provide information for, but when you actually consider the nature of most photographs, most are not likely to possess an official title. As the same classmate pointed out while advocating for the use of the Title element on this project, a title (name) is a core element in providing identity to an object, but it also plays a role in facilitating discovery and retrieval of the item in an online environment. In the absence of a pre-defined title, then, creating a suitable name for an item becomes an extremely important part of the indexing process.

Creating a unique title is definitely not an exact science. Trying to get too creative or interpretive in the forming of a title can make the item relatively inaccessible, or confusing, for potential searchers. On the other hand, getting too descriptive with a title can flood what should be a relatively simple access point with too much detail and information. On the whole, however, I believe that in this type of situation, a descriptive title is probably the best method of assigning a title, if not necessarily the simplest. Providing details such as specific player number or names can be a very useful aspect of a title, such as: "Greg McElroy throws pass versus Florida International." Trying to discern where to draw the line where including player names and numbers can be difficult, though, when facing group shots where no specific player is the focus of the photograph. Additionally, if multiple photographs of the same player performing an action are present in the collection, further information will be needed in order to disambiguate them.

This issue is a pretty intriguing problem, and it's even something that any of us with personal photo collections that we are trying to name can relate to. I will be interested to see how these issues are sorted out in the indexing guidelines.