From Spectator to Annotator: Possibilities offered by User-Generated Metadata for Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

The changing role of the user, that gradually shifts from a passive consumer of information towards a pro-active user that reorganises and manipulates data, has an increasing impact on traditional information retrieval. A multitude of practical and methodic questions rise as popular web-applications such as blogs, RSS and social bookmarking tools allow users to create and share metadata about online resources. This article tackles these issues in the particular domain of visual cultural heritage. Online image databases increasingly offer users possibilities to annotate and comment on images of interest to them. But what is the pertinence of these user contributions? How can their quality be evaluated? Concretely, our article starts with an introduction to the phenomenon of usergenerated metadata by presenting the social tagging of cultural heritage images and the practice of publishing users comments. Secondly, a case study presents an analysis of users comments within the image database of the National Archives of the Netherlands. Based on these empirical data, conclusions and generalizations outside our specific case study are