Introduction to Metadata, pathways to Digital Information: 1: Setting the Stage
“Webpage title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks” (page 1)
These are all forms of metadata that average media creators and consumers (those outside of the information professions) come into contact with. I recently heard about folksonomies in LIS 2000 and I think they are associated with user-generated tagging (such as, in an online catalog).
I never realized metadata was so important to assessing the authority of an author or document.
Metadata relates to information at the item, aggregation, and system levels. How can we look at a system as a single information object?
Library metadata includes abstracts, indexes, and bibliographic records. Is this why academic papers always have an abstract, and did this practice originate in libraries as ways to make documents easier to access?
The author briefly introduces the concept of automated metadata. I have to wonder, would automated bibliographic records and abstracts be as useful or accurate as those created by librarians? What standards would need to be enacted to ensure their accuracy?
The author points out a barrier to collaboration across fields such as libraries, museums, and archives - that the structures and understandings implicit in metadata are unique to each field. Each field has different users, expectations, vocabularies, and practices. This reminds me of an earlier article that we read about cross-disciplinary collaboration in digitizing objects - “Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a shared gateway to digital image collections of the Pittsburgh region”. It seems that collaboration works well in in digitization projects (at least the one we read about) but not so well with metadata.
The author makes an interesting point about how traditional metadata standards were paper-centric and baffled average users (non-scholars) who were not used to their format. I wonder if the search for metadata is becoming more user-friendly in the digital age as more people are media-creators and disseminators.
Metadata “provides some of the information that an information professional might have provided in a traditional, in-person reference or research setting”. Is metadata putting reference librarians out of business? Is this why reference librarians are moving away from the desk and roving around libraries, to provide reference services in more convenient ways, similar to the convenience of an online search?
Using metadata in image digitization - that’s what we did in Assignment 1 when we included descriptions of our photos in Flickr!
Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) uses a small, generic set of metadata elements that can be used across disciplines for searches on the internet. Ensures that different types of metadata are interoperable.
Folksonomies - is using a hashtag on Twitter an example of a folksonomy?
After reading this article, I have a better understanding of why metadata is so important to libraries. It makes it possible to catalog and organize information, and thorough metadata makes it easier for users to access information and will keep it in the historical record (with context intact) for years to come.
An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model
Is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative complete or still in progress? It seems like an enormous endeavor to find standard vocabularies for descriptive metadata across several disciplines. I wonder how user-generated vocabularies would fit into this equation.
Using Mendeley for Research Management
I have heard Mendeley mentioned in other LIS classes but not discovered what it really was until now. The creators of Mendeley are the same creators of Last.Fm - what an interesting pair!
Mendeley is a social network - this goes along with much of the movement towards Web 2.0.
Mendeley seems like a useful tool to be familiar with in graduate school and education in general. I just downloaded and will explore it for myself!
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