The pleasures and pitfalls of creating an image collection: quality and metadata issues

A recent project for JISC Collections – Digital Images for Education – involved acquiring 75,000 still and moving images for use by the UK education community. Creating an aggregated image collection from a wide range of vendors raised considerable logistic, quality and metadata challenges.Those challenges included the need to follow European public procurement regulations; the need to evaluate all the images provided by vendors; the consequences of adopting a common technical standard for describing the content and issues around how the various vendors adapted their disparate metadata and taxonomic standards for the purposes of the project.