Last week, Pop Up Library packed its bags for a three day tour of the university campus, bringing paintings from the art collection, our metadata tagging game and a 5kg tub of fizzy sweets to the Murray Library at KB, the Main Library on George Square and ECA Library.

The aims of the sessions were to show off items from our art collection, get students and staff to try out the latest version of our metadata game, and to raise awareness of the importance, and ubiquity, of descriptive metadata, particularly for digital objects.

Players of the game were given laptops on which were displayed a series of digital images from the art collection. They were asked to ‘say what they saw’ by tagging these and then voting on the quality of other players’ tags. Points were awarded for the best descriptive tags, and the leaderboard was displayed on TV screens and projected onto the Holopro above the Main Library Helpdesk, thus creating a healthy sense of competition amongst players. If you took part, have a look at the leaderboard below to see how you did!

STUDENTS: TOP 10STAFF: TOP 10

Alongside the game, we displayed original works of art next to their digital surrogates in order to contextualise the tagging game: the digital images in our collections are representations of physical items and the information and details that can be seen in the digital object is often quite different to that which can be seen in the original. For digital collections, it is important that items are tagged correctly so that they can be found both in search engine results and within the image database itself.

The sessions were well attended, with almost 3,500 tags entered by over 50 staff and students. The tags obtained from theses sessions, once moderated, will be uploaded to our image database and used to improve the discoverability of our digital image collection.Why not play the game for yourself on the new Edinburgh Library Labs blog?