• Khue Duong

    Khue Dong
    Univ. of Washington
    Created a digital-image catalog for the Fisheries Interaction Team.

    Khue Duong, a University of Washington, Information School student, describes his summer experience working members of the Fisheries Interaction Team and taking part in a eastern Bering Sea cruise conducting physical oceanography survey work.

    This summer I worked with Susanne McDermott and other members of the Fisheries Interaction Team (FIT) to create a digital-image catalog using Portfolio 8.5 software. The catalog is designed to organize photos taken from various scientific field studies in Alaska.

    There are a few objectives for this pilot study. The creation of the FIT digital-image catalog would help shape an AFSC-wide protocol for the archiving of image data. The catalog would also contribute to making images available for scholarly publication as well as outreach posters, web-pages and other educational material.

    By talking to other REFM FIT members, I started to understand the nature and context of different scientific cruises. From this, I was able to create a controlled vocabulary to describe the pictures. In addition to appropriate tagging, the cataloged photos also contain other metadata, which facilitates the retrieval of images when searched by keywords, photographers, cruise types or other pertinent categories. The project is currently at the stage in which the metadata in Portfolio is ready to be embedded back in the original picture files. The AFSC IT specialist will create a web-based image database with finished images in the next step.

  • Another important part of the project involved documentation, including a guide on how to upload images using Portfolio 8.5 as well as a detailed explanation of the controlled vocabularies and other customized categories.

    I am also fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in a PMEL FOCI cruise, doing physical oceanography survey work in the eastern Bering Sea for three weeks. I helped out with CTD water sampling, bongo tows, and deploying and recovering other scientific devices at different mooring sites. Observing and assisting other scientists doing field work helped me gain a better appreciation for the photos that I have been cataloging all summer. It also reaffirms my fascination with the ocean.

    My internship with the AFSC FIT team was a fruitful reality check for me. I was able to apply some of the classroom learning regarding information organization to a cataloging project. I gained a better understanding of database management as well as a taste of archiving image data.