A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: METADATA STANDARDS FOR PERSONAL GEOSCIENCE-RELATED DIGITAL IMAGE COLLECTIONS

The proliferation of digital photography has dramatically eased the process of acquiring, storing, and distributing images for use in geoscience education and research. However, increasingly extensive personal digital image collections can become diminishingly useful without adequate associated metadata. The need for geoscience-specific image metadata standards is a pressing issue for individuals who who want to search, organize, and share their images as well as those who might seek to facilitate the integration of images into institutional-based on-line collections. Commercial tools are available to assist with the annotation of images, but none adequately addresses geoscience-specific metadata requirements. Metadata standards from other disciplines could be readily adapted to address stratigraphic names, chronology, lithological terms, and location information. The Geoinformatics section of GSA is uniquely qualified to advocate for the adoption and dissemination of geoscience-specific image metadata standards for both individual and institutional digital image collections.