Narrative of DFW Experience
Information Regarding the Host Site
During Winter Quarter 2010, I had the opportunity to participate in a 3-credit directed fieldwork (DFW) at Getty Images. Getty Images is the world’s largest provider of creative and editorial images, footage, and other media. Getty’s main client-base includes advertising, marketing, and design professionals, as well as news, film industry, and other media outlets.
My DFW consisted of a wide variety of work within an ecommerce search setting. Getty Images is for-profit, so most, if not all, of their strategies and activities are client-driven. The work and tasks I undertook during my DFW aimed to enhance the customer’s search experience, mostly in terms of the results retrieved from their keyword searches. From writing Boolean queries to disambiguate editorial terms and adding names to the controlled vocabulary to working within existing keywords to produce more effective and desired image results, my work had a strong user focus, even though I did not work on the consumer-facing website directly.
Located in downtown Fremont, Getty Images occupies three floors of a modern building. Throughout the offices, beautiful and powerful photographs are displayed on the walls. During my orientation, Jennifer Rose, my supervisor, gave me a tour of Getty’s physical space, which includes numerous kitchens with free coffee, tea, and other soft drinks as a perk to employees (and interns!). During my first week of the DFW, I underwent extensive training on the proprietary software and tools Getty’s search and vocabulary teams utilize to perform their work. I was also briefed on the controlled vocabulary practices that Getty operates under.
As a search intern, I worked with the search and vocabulary teams at Getty, under the supervision of Jennifer Rose, who is a search vocabulary editor. The search and vocabulary teams fall under the technology section of Getty Images, but other key teams at Getty include sales and marketing and photo editors. It seems Getty’s teams are somewhat separate, however, they do join forces and collaborate on specific projects. Communication, cooperation, and team interaction is encouraged through weekly emails, quarterly events, and SharePoint sites dedicated to specific areas. For communication and knowledge sharing in my position, I relied heavily on email with Jennifer and the search team, as well as SharePoint and Office Communicator. We also had weekly meetings to discuss questions, review project progress, and receive new assignments.
Student Self-Evaluation of the Directed Fieldwork Experience
My initial expectations of my Directed Fieldwork experience were very broad, mostly revolving around gaining real world, industry experience on a search team. I suspected that Getty Images to have pretty specific standards, operations, and tools that they used in regard to controlled vocabulary, keywords, production of search results, and so on, and as such, I was not exactly sure how much of what I had learned thus far in my MLIS education would be relevant. Looking back on my experience, however, I am able to identify numerous courses at the iSchool that helped me to carry out my projects and provide recommendations for Getty’s search and vocabulary teams.
Of particular note are two courses: Indexing and Abstracting (LIS 536) and Information Retrieval (LIS 544). While two very different curriculums, both of these classes are about ensuring documents, images, and other materials are accurately assigned data to enable user satisfaction when looking for specific information. To see theories and practices taught in those classes in action on a consumer-facing website like Getty Images was a very beneficial experience that has not only helped to situated theory in context, but has allowed for deeper questioning and thinking about information retrieval and how best to organize it to enhance the customer experience. While I believe I was well prepared for my position at Getty Images with the classes I have taken so far, I believe that courses in thesaurus construction and databases would have been useful for me in my work as well.
Given the short period of time for the Directed Fieldwork, I believe my work performance on the various projects I participated in definitely met both my and my supervisor’s expectations. One of my key strengths that I brought to the projects was the ability to see the big picture in terms of the user experience when searching for images, and how precise and accurate results will ultimately lend itself to increased revenue for the company. One weakness I was faced with was my desire for perfection in image results based on Boolean queries and rules that I wrote. Sometimes I struggled with knowing when to stop working on a project, as perfection can rarely be achieved in image retrieval when you are dealing with millions of images from hundreds of collections, and the various ways they are keyworded.
Overall, I had a very positive Directed Fieldwork experience, and I did not encounter any issues or problems. Jennifer Rose, my supervisor, was extremely helpful throughout the quarter in providing feedback, helping me identify projects that could best utilize my skills while providing me experience in specific areas of interest, and was a fantastic person to work with in general. I believe that a Directed Fieldwork is a very valuable addition to an MLIS degree, and the process the iSchool has set up is very streamlined and organized. I do not believe I have any suggestions, as flexibility in narratives, objectives, and deliverables is afforded, given the wide range of DFW sites and projects. I would definitely participate in a DFW again, and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to other students in the MLIS program.
