While the title, Digital Images for the Information Professional, suggests that this book is aimed specifically at those people labelled “information professionals” and defined by the author as individuals “working in a library, archive, museum, cultural heritage or information environment” – the book in fact has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience than the title suggests. With a solid historical and contemporary context underpinning all of the issues discussed, this book will also be of interest to photographers, anthropologists, art historians, those in the creative industries, and any researcher/academic who needs to find out more about digital images.
The book consists of eight chapters in total, each covering a different aspect of digital images; and there is a noticeable contrast between those chapters which cover the historical and cultural aspects of images, those which discuss the contemporary and practical issues, and those which explain the more “technical” elements of images.
Chapters that discuss the historical and cultural context of images are: the “Introduction” and “The history of digital images”. The introductory chapter explores the role of images in society (both analogue and digital) and highlights the way that image creation and consumption have changed due to the rise of digital cameras and mobile phones. This introduction is then consolidated with the chapter on the history of digital images, starting with early electronic images and facsimiles, to the development of personal computing, the networked environment and the advent of digital image capture devices.
The chapters that look at the more practical and contemporary issues relating to images are: “Digital images and memory institutions”, “Personal digital image collections”, and “Current issues in digital imaging”. “Digital images and memory institutions” includes an element of the “how to”, and while the author stresses that this book is not purely a guide to how to manage and carry out a digitisation programme, this chapter still gives the perfect background for anyone thinking of embarking on a digitisation project. This chapter along with “Personal digital image collections” is complemented by the chapter titled “Image metadata”, which, although a fairly technical chapter in its descriptions of traditional metadata and classification schemes, goes on to discuss the more recent emergence of user generated folksonomies in online image management sites such as Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket.
The more overtly technical chapters are: “Digital image fundamentals”, and “Image file formats”, and these chapters exhaustively cover the mechanics of images such as pixels, resolution, bit depth, image size, compression, and image formats. In this respect the book can be almost kept aside as a reference guide.
The only real criticism of the book is the fact that readers may find some of the technical detail a bit excessive. For example the explanation of what a .jpeg file format is in the “Image file formats” chapter runs to seven pages. In addition each chapter has a section on further reading, so for any of the less exhaustive aspects discussed in the book, anyone wanting to delve a little further into any of the particulars has plenty points of reference for doing so. The author also provides an extensive bibliography and index.
Overall, this book is perfect for anyone wanting to find out about digital images, and the author adopts an interesting mix of reference, theory and practice in her writing style.
