Metadata: Cataloging by Any Other Name ...
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/milstead1.html
Metadata Projects and Standards
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/milstead1.html#projects
Metadata for a Corporate Intranet
not available online
The article on Metadata Projects and Standards states:
A major difference between the library-proposed standards
and the others is in the expectation of who applies the
metadata to each work. Since it is impossible for
all electronic files to be cataloged professionally, the focus outside
the
library community has been on enabling the creators
of electronic resources to create the metadata fields for inclusion in
the record for an object. Web authors, who probably
do not even know what an "index" is (or who think it's something
computers do by creating an inverted file of all the
words in a record), are very interested in metadata as a vehicle for
improving their ranking by a Web search engine. They
therefore seek suggestions and guidance for including
subject-oriented metadata in their records. Because
of this widespread interest, metadata standards groups have been
established. There are many--perhaps too many--formal
initiatives underway.
How can there be too many attempts to formalize and
standardize metadata? It's very simple. Even though there are
disparate sets of needs (the metadata required for
an environmental inventory, an image of a museum object, and a violent
video, for example), there is still a high degree
of overlap. Objects in a collection all have creators. Generally, they
have
titles, they have dates of creation and modification,
and so on. If like information is treated alike, the information is more
accessible. The metadata projects all acknowledge
that we really need to settle on one name for the creator of an object,
be it "author," "artist," or "creator."
As more and more information becomes available electronically,
the problem of finding it becomes more acute. This need
has driven people to meet and talk earnestly all over
the world. It's hard to determine just how many meetings and
workshops have been or are being held on metadata,
The three articles seem to be geared towards someone who has little
or no knowledge about the topic of metadata and would be very useful reading
for an undergraduate computer science class being introduced to this topic.
Beyond that, though, when the three articles are taken as a whole they
offer a good summary of the state of metadata and what is being done and
by whom. As well, one article offers a fairly useful list of
metadata resource on the web:
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/milstead1.html#list
Diva