Organizing moving image collections for the digital era: the goldspeil report

Information Outlook, August, 2002 by James M. Turner, Michele Hudon, Yves Devin

All the participating organizations in our study showed interest in our project and its hypotheses. In addition, all found interesting and doable the idea of a common thesaurus for managing general moving image collections of everyday persons, objects and events. In the context of other research projects we have undertaken, and in light of the results of analysis of other lexical data, we are studying the possiblity of creating and testing such a thesaurus.

Table 1

Formats used in the collections

Type                              Number of
                                collections

8 mm film                                 4
16 mm film                                8
35 mm film                                8
72 mm film                                1
Other film formats                        6
3/4" U-Matic video                       11
1-inch video                              8
2-inch video                              5
Betacam                                  13
Other video formats                      10
Optical disk and other formats            5
Table 2

Size of the collections

Collection  Number     Viewing time
number      of titles  (hours)

1           4,962      n/a
2           14,000     3,800
3           n/a        n/a
4           36,848     n/a
5           11,755     750
6           100,000    n/a
7           n/a        n/a
8           n/a        n/a
9           50,000     17,500
10          n/a        n/a
11          18,500     17,848
12          94,732     n/a
13          5,600      n/a
14          n/a        n/a
Table 3

Types of indexing languages used in the collections

Type of Indexing        Number of
Language              collections

Keywords                        7
Classification                  3
Commercial thesaurus            2
In-house thesaurus              5
Mixed thesaurus                 1
Subject headings                6
Other                           6
Table 4

Types of terms found in the thesauri

Thesaurus  Total number  Terms other       Proper names (personal,
number     of terms      than descriptors  geographic, etc.)

1          6,969         1,451             2,244
2          344,500       8,850             220,000
3          3,222         n/a               660
4          1,163         42                744
5          704           89                n/a
6 *        3,680         1,346             1,204

* For Thesaurus 6, only words beginning with the letters F, I and R are
counted
Table 5

Frequency of the terms

Number    Number of    Percentage
of tools  descriptors  this represents

1         1,680        73
2         338          15
3         134          6
4         72           3
5         47           2
6         14           0.6
7         7            0.3

Total     2,292        99.9

The deadline to be considered for the 2003 award is February, 2003. To find out more, go to www.sla.org and type in keyword "Goldspiel" in the search field or contact John Latham at 202-939-3639 or John@sla.org.