This week I looked at the National Park Service Digital Image Index, a collection of images of national parks and events associated with national parks. The images are available for download as a JPEG or PCD.
Selection decisionsIt looks as if the NPS posts all public domain images on this site, so that the only requirements for an image to be included is that it is of a park and is in the public domain. The site doesn’t mention if a certain individual takes the photographs, though if they are in the public domain I believe that must mean that a NPS employee has taken them on the job.
Metadata
The metadata for the site is minimal. The only real descriptive metadata is the name of the park with which the image is associated, one of the search terms. Several of the links are broken. When you click on an image, it will also tell you what state the park is in. For administrative metadata, the filenames are labeled per park name and then with a four-digit number.
The images can also be searched by subject, such as Employees and Volunteers, or Youth Programs. However, these aren’t all available and several of them have very few images available.
The images are available in three formats: thumbnail, JPEG, and PCD or TIFF. Unfortunately their use of the PCD file format is not very sustainable since it is a proprietary format (Kodak). The other formats, however, are sustainable.
Intended Audience
The intended audience is anyone who needs to repurpose an image of the NPS. I would expect the site to be better linked to the NPS homepage; however, I had trouble clicking through from there – it was easiest found using Google.
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