Drs. Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jörgensen of the School of Library & Information Studies at College of Communication & Information have been awarded a research grant as co-principal investigators of “Assessing the reuse value of socially created metadata for image indexing.” The grant is funded by the Library and Information Science Research Grant Program of the Online Computer Library Center/Association for Library and Information Science Education (OCLC/ALISE).

Traditional thesauri and knowledge organization systems can become quickly outdated because they exist within environments that are continually changing. Acquiring the knowledge to update these systems and modifying them to keep up with change is costly. There is a need to identify inexpensive methods for the dynamic acquisition and integration of new knowledge into these systems.

The objective of this study is to determine whether end-user generated indexing terms can be used to improve the quality of an expert-created controlled vocabulary. The project will evaluate the use of socially created image indexing metadata from Flickr and the English Wikipedia for updating the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The project will also define and evaluate novel methods and algorithms for generating a thesaurus from Flickr and Wikipedia datasets.

Besiki Stvilia, Assistant Professor at the School of Library & Information Studies at Florida State University, studies evolving patterns of collaborative work organization and technology use in large community based open information systems. He develops models for information and metadata measurement, dynamics and effective intervention. Corinne Jörgensen, Professor and Director of the School of Library & Information Studies at Florida State University, is an internationally recognized scholar in the areas of image indexing, image retrieval, and user image searching. She studies images as cognitive and mediated objects in information systems.