Digital Image Tagging: A Case Study with Seventh Grade Students

Abstract

Results of this exploratory study suggested engaging students in digital image tagging can have analytical and educational importance. The study was designed to gauge middle school students' capacities to describe digitalimages from two digital libraries that they used in an information literacy activity. When describing the image attributes, students (N=81) freely chose single words and multi-word phrases to describe the interpretations, feelings, and questions evoked by the images. These descriptors were used to derive conceptual categories for the seventeen digital images. Results demonstrated that students acknowledged the responsibility of indexers to choose index terms for objects in collections that enable identification, organization and retrieval. The study sheds light on the potential to improve age-appropriate access to images by means of offering a multi-tiered approach to image representation. It also introduces a transparent approach to teaching information literacy concepts through creative thinking about the meaning of resources and their relationship in a broader information cycle context.