Last year, I had the opportunity to introduce our Digital Asset Library project to the City Planning Urban Design team at a staff meeting in Etobicoke. Our first phase is a pilot with a smaller unit that is part of Urban Design, the Graphics and Visualization unit, but we wanted to provide an update to the larger team. I sat in on the full meeting, and it was fascinating to get a big picture view of design and planning projects underway. I was intrigued by work to connect South Etobicoke and Mimico with the waterfront, and integrate a growing Humber College into the surrounding community and historic campus.
There were some great questions during my presentation and many staff took the time to speak to me afterwards with their thoughts. A few key issues that came out of our conversations:
1) the need for terminology and vocabulary control. As a librarian whose recent work has focused on implementing controlled vocabularies in 311 and Toronto Meeting Management Information System, this came as no surprise to me. Most of our currently required fields for City Planning (asset security level, asset type, asset subtype, district and records classification code) do have drop down lists for consistency in tagging and ease of searching. The "keywords" field is currently free text, but a controlled vocabulary here could certainly be useful. For the first phase, the development and integration of a controlled vocabulary for subject (keywords) was out of scope. However, we will examine this possibility for a later phase. One benefit of allowing staff to apply their own keywords in the first phase is the creation of rich source of user-preferred terms that describe the content. These terms can then be used as the basis for a future controlled vocabulary. Integrating a controlled vocabulary here will be much more complex than simply a drop down list. This is due to the number of potential terms and relationships between terms, as well as the need for an easy to use tagging tool to access the vocabulary.
2) allocating staff resources for uploading content. As I mentioned in the presentation, we will get the most value out of our content if good quality metadata (tagging) is applied and this does require an investment of time. We asked for a commitment from designated staff to spend 1 hr each week uploading content.
3) Need for a content strategy and business rules specific to Urban Design. I heard some concerns that we don't want to upload every single image or graphic created or used. For this first phase, we are focusing on high value content that is most likely to be searched and reused, as well as final designs in high resolution PDF form. This the same approach being adopted by City Clerk's Photo/Video unit and Information Production (Design, Print and Prepress). We limit permission to upload to only designated staff who understand the process and rules.
4) Need to protect privacy of individuals in photographs. Because few people in urban design photographs have signed a consent form, we need to control access to these images. We encourage photographers to use crowd shots as well as side or rear-facing shots. Images with identifiable individuals made available for reuse must include a consent form, be from a City event that included a clear notice of collection statement, or have identifying details (faces, license plates) digitally blurred/hidden.
5) Integrate GPS camera and mapping capabilities into DAL. At least one third to one half of searches are likely to be location based - so having the GPS data automatically tagged will be extremely useful. At present, we have a metadata field for District and Municipal Address. We will further develop the requirements for automated mapping capabilities for our next phase.
6) Controlling access to authorized users. For the first phase, we are providing access to two or three users (i.e., people who can download and upload images) per District so we can work the kinks out of the system in an organized way. We will add additional users over time.
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