I found this great example of user generated metadata. It’s a photograph from The Smithsonian Institution libraries and it portraits: Niels Bohr, James Franck, Albert Einstein and Isidor Isaac Rabi.

The metadata provided by the Smithsonian are poor and some plain wrong. But fortunately Flickr has some bright users who noticed the errors (the date was set to 1879).

When librarians and custodians have ask me, if I thought that they could let users tag and comment their resources. I always said “What’s in it for the user?”, and thus shoot down the idea. But this example shows that users apparently tag and comment without any gratification other than the contribution to the community.