Week 5 Readings

The Wikipedia entry on “Database” was enlightening--who knew there were so many different types of databases?!  It’s helpful to see examples, too:  now I know that Microsoft Access, which I have tried to used on occasion, is a DBMS; that Oracle/PRISM human resources application, and PeopleSoft and the Data Warehouse used here at Pitt are (I’m assuming) all “operational” database; that the IMDB that I use often at work is an “external” database..  Would the Excel spreadsheet I use to keep track of my family’s finances be considered an “end-user” database, I wonder?  I’m also wondering if the “indexing” discussed here is the kind of indexing and query-running that you can do with Access?  I didn’t understand much of the rest of this, I’m afraid. 

I found Gilliland’s “Introduction to Metadata” extremely helpful.  I especially like her comparison, at the end, of metadata to the Rosetta Stone.  I have had some minimal exposure to metadata, having taken both Cataloging and Indexing in the course of completing this program.  But my cataloging experience was limited to books, and Gilliland reminds me that there are a lot of other things that get metadata attached to them:  in fact, “any information object” can (and will) have metadata.  So it’s not just libraries that use metadata, but museums and archives and repositories and even Internet resource providers. Which means that lots of people will be creating and using metadata.  Here are some key points I’d like to remember:  

• “All information objects have three features:  content, context, and structure”
• “There is no single metadata standard that is adequate for describing all types of collections and materials”
• “Metadata not only identifies and describes an information object; it also documents how that object behaves, its function and use, its relationship to other information objects, and how it should be and has been managed over time”
• “It is helpful to separate metadata into distinct categories--administrative, descriptive, preservation, use, and technical metadata”
• “Metadata continues to accrue during the life of an information object”
• “Effectiveness of searching can be significantly enhanced through the existence of rich, consistent, carefully crafted descriptive metadata”

Now, I do think metadata can be overwhelming for those who aren’t in the know about it.  I find the idea of “user-created” metadata intriguing, since the average person using, say, Flickr, may use the same “vocabulary” as me, and so I might have an easier time finding what I’m looking for using folksonomies rather than the controlled vocabularies of LCSH.  On the other hand, I can see how folksonomies could really become--in the truest sense of the word--uncontrollable, and therefore useless.  The section entitled “Some Little-Known Facts about Metadata” is a nice summary of the full discussion.  And the section on “Why Is Metadata Important” reminds me, also, of the issues confronting the information professional and why it all matters. 

The Dublin Core document was more distracting than informative, for all its typos and poor writing.  I understand it’s a “work in progress,” but geez. . . .  Anyway, what I take away from this is that Dublin Core (DC) is an international effort across disciplines to describe “diverse resources” so they can be searched for and found electronically (which, I think, means it was intended to deal with Web resources).  There’s lots here about “semantics” and “refinement” and “standards” and “vocabularies,” but it’s all way over my head.  It’s clear that there’s a lot of techy-geeky stuff that’s behind the creation of this particular metadata format, which is all very impressive.  But I'd need to have it really dumbed-down if I were going to really understand the Dublin Core Data Model.