Week Five:

REQUIRED READING NOTES

Introduction to Metadata, pathways to Digital Information: 1: Setting the Stage
Anne J. Gilliland (2008)

• The term "metadata" literally means "data about data" - is a widely used and frequently underspecified term in the professional communities that use information systems and resources.
• In the past 100 years, the creation and management of metadata is the responsibility of information professionals engaged in the fields of CATALOGING, CLASSIFICATION, and INDEXING. This is changing as information resources are becoming put online by the public.
• College students are taught in information literacy courses to look for the metadata such as data information to determine where or not a source is authoritative from the Web. 
• It is important for information professionals AND creators and users of digital content to understand the roles of different types of metadata in ensuring accessible, authoritative, and record-keeping systems.
• Metadata was used by communities involved with the management of data and systems maintenance.
• it is the sum total of what can be said about any information object at any level of group.
• This means anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an info system.
• object may comprise a single item, an aggregate of items, or an entire database.
• All information objects have three features: content, context, and structure.
• content relates to what the object contains or is about. (intrinsic)
• context indicates who, what, when, where, and why associated with object's creation (extrinsic)
• structure refers to formal set of associations within or among individual information objects. (can be both intrinsic and extrinsic)
• Library metadata development provides intellectual and physical access to collection materials. Includes indexes, abstracts, and bibliographic records such as the Library of Congress system.
• Created by humans but also in automated ways such as metadata mining, harvesting, and Web crawling.
• An emphasis on structure of information objects in metadata development has been less overt in past years.
• In an environment where a user can gain unmediated access to information objects over a network, metadata:
• certifies the authenticity and degree of completeness of the content
• establishes and documents the context of the content
• provides a range of intellectual access points for an increasingly diverse range of users
• Acquisition records, exhibition catalogs, licensing agreements, and educational metadata are examples of other kinds of metadata.
• User-created metadata has also been gathering momentum in varieties of venues on the Web. Uploading personal videos and photos to YouTube and Flickr dives into the business of creating, sharing, and copying metadata.
• folksonomies - created using specialized tagging tools in various Web-based communities to share, identify, retrieve, categorize, and promote web content. 
• Varying types of metadata include administrative, descriptive, preservation, technical, and use. Primary functions may be:
• creation, reuse, and re-contextualization of information objects. 
• organization and description
• validation
• searching and retrieval
• utilization and preservation
• disposition
•  Metadata is important because it increases accessibility for items. it allows for searches to reach across multiple collections at once. It plays a crucial role in documenting and maintaining important relationships.
• expanding use of digital information systems
• learning tool
• document changing uses of systems and content - turn feedback into systems development decisions.
• allows repositories to track many layers of rights, licensing, and reproduction information
• preservation and persistance
• system improvements and economics

"An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model" by Eric J. Miller
http://dublincore.org/1999/06/06-overview/

• Shows the personal view of the relationship between a RDF (resource description framework) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiatives data modeling activity. Not completed as of June 6, 1999.
• describes the effort to create a consensus across disciplines for the discovery-oriented description of diverse resources in an electronic environment.
• DCMI defined the DCES (Dublin Core Element set) which was intended to support cross-discipline resource discoveries. 
• the article provides "a general overview of these function requirements as well as an introduction to the supporting data model and syntactic representation".
• I couldn't understand the majority of this article, it was a lot of technical jargon that I was unfamiliar with. :(

Using Mendeley for Research Management by Julie Meloni
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/using-mendeley-for-research-management/25627

• This article explains the program Mendeley, a software program that organizes, shares, and discovers research articles. 
• It's core functions are to organize and index PDF documents into a concise bibliography - all while gathering details to allow users to search, customize, and cite from materials. 
• it serves as a social network, where groups and fellow researchers are able to collaborate online. 

Thoughts 

I liked the introduction article in metadata. I have always been a little intimidated by the term metadata, but this first reading assigned to us was a helpful tool in identifying what the term means and how it is used in the information professions. The detailed report from 1999 was ineffective to me as a student. I didn't understand the premise and I wish that when I was reading it, that I had been familiar with the subject. I have no previous experience with information technologies so it was a useless article for me.