Sept. 30 Required Readings: Metadata and Content Management

1. Intro to Metadata, Pathways to Digital Information
     This reading discusses how libraries create metadata (data about data) for indexes, abstracts, bibliographic records, and really any document or data in their collection to provide access to it. But in the digital age, it's not just librarians/information professionals who are creating metadata about an object. Really anyone can create metadata by saying what the content, context, and/or structure of the object, data, information, etc is and user created metadata is gaining momentum online.
     Metadata is governed by a "community-fostered" to ensure quality and consistency but there is no consistent metadata standard that is interdisciplinary enough to be adequate for all collections/materials in all fields. Theres also an issue of managing and maintaining metadata, but algorithms can at times ease this difficulty.
    All-in-all this reading reinforced my knowledge of how metadata certifies authenticity, establishes context of content, identifies relationships between other information, provides access points, and much more to create, organize and describe information. The reading kept mentioning folksonomies, which I have no idea what that is.

2. Dublin Core Data Model
     The reading describes a data model that attempts to create international and interdisciplinary metadata. This RDF and Dublin Core initiative will identify common cross-domain qualifiers through internationalization, modularization, element identification, semantic refinement, identification of coding schemes, and identification of structured compound values.
     It's called RDF-W3C's resource description framework and it looks a lot like HTML meets a MARC record. I think it would be incredibly helpful and almost revolutionary if it worked and took over metadata standards. But it seems like one of those things that sound great in theory- but could never truly work in reality.

3. Using Mendeley
     I really like the authors approach and writing style for this reading. He seemed very honest and real about how Mendeley worked and made me consider more of his opinions had he been a more boring writer. I actually download Zotero after reading the article (I already have and use Mendeley).
     But, he basically explained Mendeley's key features and their pros and cons. His point about the social networking aspect is really relevant, because the feature really is only as good as the people in your field that are using it. The feature does not add any value if no one is using it. But, the feature does make Mendeley a strong competitor for scholarly collaboration.
     Other cool features include the recommendation feature that's based off of the papers you view and share. How Mendeley will organize your documents and cite for you. It's also free to use (expect more storage cost money).