Share Your Metadata-ness
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Please share your answers and they will be dynamically added to this page.
Name | Affiliation/ Department | What is your burning metadata question? | What does metadata mean to you? |
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| Nico Carver | Metadata Research Center/ Dryad | I am sure there are cases where a document has too much metadata, but I can't think of any examples. How much is too much? | Metadata gives digital objects much-needed context in a crazy, unordered world. Without these contextual clues, we might still be able to find things, but we wouldn't know anything about their provenance, access controls, history, etc. |
| Jane Greenberg | SILS/Metadata Research Center | For over a decade, I still remain interested in discovering the best approach for metadata generation. The question: What is the most efficient and effective way to generate good quality metadata integrating automatic and human approaches (both resource creator and professionally generated)? | representation; structured information about any entity, form, or mode generated to facilitate a function (discovery, life-cycle tracking, etc.) |
| Joseph Busch | Project Performance Corporation/ Taxonomy Strategies | Since metadata is all around us, how can it best be recognized, characterized, harvested, aggregated, refined, used and re-used, so that objects/content/things can be found, used, enjoyed, combined, etc.? | Metadata is descriptions of things--any thing, objects, content, data, entities, and descriptions of descriptions of things, and ... Metadata is what instantiates the existance of things. |
| Sarah Ramdeen | UNC SILS/PhD student | How can metadata be captured as part of the everyday workflow instead of a secondary process? Can we encourage people to adopt metadata capture as part of their workflow when they don't really understand what metadata is and how it will be used? | Metadata is so many things, one facet is that metadata is a collection of information that may not necessarily be contained with in an item but helps define and shape how we use an item. |
| Seth Shaw | Electronic Records Archivist, Duke University Archives | How can we best create, manage, and interface with metadata for born-digital electronic records? | Metadata is context; preserving the "is" and "about"-ness of information and their representations. |
| Ryan Shaw | SILS/Metadata Research Center | What is the difference (if any) between metadata and derived data? | Metadata isn't a kind of data but a kind of relationship between a person and some data. |
| Sean Chen | Digital Resources Librarian | Is making heterogenous metadata interoperate worth the trouble? | Yummy in my tummy. Metadata means potential to me, the building blocks of coolness. |
| Arlene G Taylor | Distinguished Adjunct Prof., SILS | Why is it that so many library administrators think that with full text searching (using keywords), no metadata is required, while at the same time, people in many other disciplines are coming to the conclusion that keyword searching is ineffective and inefficient and that it is much more cost effective to apply metadata containing controlled vocabularies up front? | Metadata is a presentation of characteristics of an entity; metadata allows focused searching of large data stores as opposed to the randomness of keyword searching that can produce totally irrelevant “hits.” |
| Cheryl Thompson | SILS Master Student; Metadata Research Center & Odum Institute Archive | How can we teach non-LIS folks to create/use/love metadata? | Metadata is the description, the context...its all the meaningful details that help you retrieve, access and use information |
| Brian Young | SILS Master Student | How much value can be derived by supplementing professionally created metadata with user-generated metadata? Would user-generated metadata create more noise than benefit? | Metadata, so to speak, is the map, not the territory. But we have to make sure the map is readable and represents the territory in a way users can understand and use. |
| Kun Huang | visiting scholar/ Beijing Normal University/School of Management | What is good tag or bad tag in collaborative indexing, such as folksonomy, when we use them to generate metadata?It seems that good tags are those with high frequency because they may be what users most possibly think to use when they want to search the information. But some tags with low frequency may also represent some special attributes of information. | Metadata is an effective way to keep everything structured, organized and easy to be retrieved in the future. |
| Mary Ann Barnett | NCCU SLIS Masters Student | What are the key points to teaching the importance of metadata especially to non-LIS administrators and colleagues? And, will the more simplistic metadata standards, such as Dublin Core, replace the cumbersome MARC format for cataloging? | Metadata is needed to ensure the accessibility of information resources. It ensures they can not only be found, but also retrieved and stored. |
| Mike Conway | DICE Java/Interface Developer, SILS Masters Student (IS) | What are the practical implementation practices and architectures for maintaining metadata and allowing discovery across different domains? | Metadata is about facilitating discovery and sharing of digital information. |
Photo Credits:
Photo 1: What is Metadata? SEO for Dummies. http://blog.hudsonhorizons.com
Photo 2: NYPL Lab, The New York Public Library
Photo 1: What is Metadata? SEO for Dummies. http://blog.hudsonhorizons.com
Photo 2: NYPL Lab, The New York Public Library