Who you work with#
CWS Media and Outreach, as described in Brief 08. This brief combines two of their requests, ranked second and third, because both are the same problem: finding what CWS already has.
The situation#
Two archives. One is a large and growing set of photographs and videos in Google Drive folders. The other is a set of documents holding approved statistics, programme information and institutional facts — the numbers CWS is allowed to publish.
A staff member writing a grant application or a press response needs both, quickly, and needs to know the number is current and approved.
What is going wrong#
Finding a photograph means remembering which folder it is in and who took it. Finding a statistic means asking a colleague, who may give you last year’s figure. A wrong number in a grant application or a news article is a real cost to a research organisation.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Drive search reads filenames, and a filename like IMG_4471.jpg tells you nothing. Adding metadata to thousands of existing files by hand is more work than anyone has time for. For the documents, the problem is different: the difficulty is not searching but knowing which version is the approved one and who approved it.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT.
- Technical skills — Search and retrieval, document and image indexing, vision models for tagging, metadata design, permissions, evaluating a system for factual accuracy.
- Other skills — Information architecture, designing a process people will keep using, testing for failure rather than for success.