Visual Materials and Online Access: Issues Concerning Content Representation

Abstract

ture addressing the topic of intellectual access to visual materials. However, while conducting the investigation it became clear that none of the authors had presented a general overview of the difficulties surrounding the topic itself. Several areas covered in detail in several separate articles are examined here, since it was felt that a higher and more holistic view of the current situation surrounding image access was needed. The painting La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) by Ren? Magritte stands as an appropriate metaphor for the state of affairs concerning intel lectual access to images. While the realistic representation of the pipe is definitely a believable image, it is certainly not a pipe. Similarly, much of the research into content representation of images appears not to recognize a number of basic issues under lying the difficulty in achieving satisfactory results in this area. One of the critical reasons for the lack of tools and techniques for access to visual materials is the low status these materials have historically held in libraries and archives.1 Most collections of cultural materials and their visual surrogates remain, at least in part, unindexed in the basic sense. At the same time pressures to make it all available continue to rise at a nearly exponential rate.2 While it sounds alarmist to state this, a comparable analogy to the print world would be to expect a book collection, indexed as it would have been in a pre-card-catalog era, to be fully acces sible online within a few months.