Palm Springs Boutique Hotels: A Digital Asset Management Metadata Project
This online digital photo collection is titled Palm Springs Boutique Hotels and features a series of photographs from various boutique hotels at Palm Springs' historic tennis club district. The collection resides on the image hosting service Flickr which serves as the Data Asset Management system for this project. I started by choosing twenty photographs from various hotels which I thought helped showcase the unique charm of Palm Springs. These were identified after looking through several hundred photos and selecting what represented the best variety in architecture and design. Seven different hotels are represented in total:
· Del Marcos Hotel
· Korakia Pensione
· Amin Casa
· Desert Hills
· Casa Cody
· Colony 29
· The Three Fifty Hotel
My user group for this collection are those interested in the architectural design and styles prominent in the Palm Springs area or Southern California which has similar styles throughout. Some of these styles include Mid-Century Modern, Moroccan/Mediterranean, Spanish Colonial Revival, and Hollywood Regency, which are the main styles that made Palm Springs famous in its Golden Age of the 1920s through 1950s. Users would be interested in seeing photos of these hotels to assist in their research of these unique styles.
When thinking about the metadata I wanted to include, I began with Dublin Core since it is a widely used standard and serves well for a collection of photos. Here are the rules I came up with to fit the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set:
1. Title – Title of the photograph
2. Creator – Kyle Hanson
3. Subject – Palm Springs Hotel
4. Description – Description of the photograph
5. Publisher – Creative Boulevards (Design Name used by Kyle Hanson)
6. Contributor – The name of the hotel depicted in the photograph
7. Date – Date the photo was taken, YYYYMMDD (ISO 861)
8. Type - Image
9. Format - JPEG
10. Identifier – Name/number of the photo as taken by camera
11. Source – Creative Boulevards Photography Archive
12. Language – English, en
13. Relation – IsPartOf HotelName
14. Coverage – Palm Springs, CA
15. Rights – ©Kyle Hanson, Creative Boulevards
I then came up with file naming conventions for the title of each photo before uploading:
Date_HotelName_Keyword_FirstnameLastname.JPG
These conventions begin with the date, hotel name, keyword, and my first and last name. The keyword used in the file name describes the area of the hotel the photo was taken as established from this controlled vocabulary of hotel spaces for this collection:
Exterior, Pool, Library, Patio, Courtyard, Lobby, Dining Room, Living Room, Bedroom, Bungalow
These words help best describe the various spaces in this collection. I used Adobe Lightroom to add GPS coordinates to each photo so that the exact location would automatically upload when adding to Flickr. Using Adobe Bridge, I went into the IPTC Core Metadata and added the following information which would also be automatically extracted into Flickr during upload:
City: Palm Springs
State: California
Copyright Status: ©Kyle Hanson, Creative Boulevards
Copyrighted (this is now checked)
Since every photograph would contain this information, it was easier to make these bulk changes in Adobe Bridge before uploading to Flickr. It was now time to upload all twenty photos at once into Flickr. At this stage, this DAM program asked if I wanted to add any keywords to all photos. In addition to the already extracted Palm Springs and California, I added Hotel, Boutique, Architecture, and Design as I felt all these terms fit well for this collection.
EXIF metadata, those that were embedded in each photograph at the time of capture, were also automatically imported and generated into Flickr. These fields include: Camera, Lens, Focal Length, Aperture, Speed, ISO, Date Taken, Width & Height, Resolution, DPI, Color Space, and Format being the most important fields. The IPTC Core Metadata that I added, GPS, City, State, and Copyright were also located in this EXIF dropdown section of Flickr.
Since Flickr has their own metadata fields setup, not every element that I had decided upon with Dublin Core was used; however, it was still a valuable lesson to decide which parts of a photograph were important to establish metadata for. The Dublin Core fields that were pertinent to Flickr include: Title, Creator/Publisher, Subject, Description, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, and Rights.
I added a caption for each photograph into the description field in Flickr using a one sentence description which included the hotel name, architectural style, and location as used in the file name. The users would want to be able to retrieve the photos by these design terms. I then went in to add additional keywords to each photo. These keywords were decided after visiting the website for each hotel and documenting how each of them described their property.
· Del Marcos Hotel, Mid-century, modern, patio, contemporary, cool, stylish, style
· Korakia Pensione, Moroccan, mediterranean, pool, entrance, door, romantic, romance, villa, vintage
· Amin Casa, Hollywood regency, bungalow, pool, glamour, luxury, history
· Desert Hills, Mid-century, modern, palm trees, mountains, classic, nostalgia, charm
· Casa Cody, Spanish Colonial Revival, mountains, suite, dining room, living room, history, charm
· Colony 29, Spanish Colonial Revival, suite, natural, intimate
· The Three Fifty Hotel, Mid-century, modern, modernist, paradise, chic, minimalism
These keywords aligned with the decided user group of those interested Palm Springs architecture, design, and style. Occasionally, additional keywords such as palm tree and mountains were added as well if it was a prominent feature in the photo that one may be interested in discovering. Though not intended for this user group, this collection could also be searchable and enjoyed by those looking for accommodations in Palm Springs.
A new sub-category was created with photos titled Palm Springs Boutique Hotel Pools.
This was the perfect sub-category since many of these hotels highlighted their pools as one of their main features and amenities. The photos in this group all feature the hotel pool as noted in the title and by each sharing the keyword pool. Flickr does not allow sub-categories so this is a new album.
The most complicated aspect of this collection deals with copyright, licensing, and legal information. I technically own the copyright to each of these photographs since they are my own, and I have added ©Kyle Hanson, Creative Boulevards to each photograph for the rights. I do not own or have the rights to the hotel properties featured in each photo. Each boutique hotel themselves owns the rights to their respective property. It is fair use for me to upload the photos for my users interested in architecture and design. If anyone wanted to purchase or license the photos, I would need to gain additional permission from each hotel.
Overall, this collection of Palm Springs boutique hotel photos was a great lesson in identifying & selecting digital assets to manage, deciding on users & their retrieval requirements, organizing & grouping, adding automatically generated and manually created metadata, creating controlled vocabularies, describing assets through text and keywords, and researching licensing.