Issues in Object-Level Description of Press Photography Collections : Toward a Metadata Standard for Photojournalism

The role of photojournalism archives is in a state of reinvention as physical collections move from agencies to cultural institutions. The accessibility of collections is imperative for new research focusing on recognizing the complex nature of the printed page and the various editorial, aesthetic and political forces involved in producing a publication. Researchers are using primary photographic objects along with original press materials to discover new aspects of photojournalism’s history. These collections represent a unique challenge for institutions, where the multiple physical manifestations of a single image each contribute to an understanding of how photography was used by the media. Traditional cataloguing standards for image collections excel at recording image content, but there remains no standard for the description of photojournalism objects. This thesis posits a method of describing photojournalism objects by utilizing existing structural metadata standards in order to improve database browsing capabilities, thus improving research efficiency.