CHAOS (Cultural Heritage Archive Open System)
provides streaming access to more than 500,000 broadcasts by
the Danish Broadcast Corporation from 1931 and onwards. The
archive is part of the LARM project with the purpose of enabling
researchers to search, annotate, and interact with recordings.
To support the researchers the optimal way, a usercentred
approach was taken to develop the platform and related
metadata scheme. Based on the requirements, a three level metadata
scheme was developed: 1) core archival metadata, 2) LARM
metadata, and 3) project-specific metadata. The paper analyses
how researchers apply the metadata scheme in their research
work. The purpose is to gain insight into broadcast researchers’
tagging practice and motivation for tagging to inform future design
of digital cultural heritage systems. The study consists of
two studies, a) a qualitative study of subjects and vocabulary of
the applied metadata and annotations, and b) five semistructured
interviews about goals for tagging. The findings clearly show that the primary role of LARM.fm is to provide access to broadcasts and provide tools to segment and manage concrete segments of radio broadcasts. Although the assigned
metadata are project-specific, they have been applied to serve as
invaluable access points for fellow researchers due to their factual
and neutral nature. The researchers particularly stress
LARM.fm’s strength in providing streaming access to a large,
shared corpus of broadcasts.