I'm reposting this July D-Lib article by Stuart Weibel that I first saw referenced in Scott Leslie's EdTechPost (Scott's comments on the article are listed below). I receive D-Lib but had overlooked this elegantly written article; part of the great value of web sharing with rss feeds from weblogs and electronic journals is in getting multiple opportunities to consider and reconsider resources.
I agree with Scott that the author, Stuart Weibel, provides a useful perspective on the history, development, and current state of metadata work. My own experience has been that metadata is NOT often likely to be provided by the creators of resources and that the burden of doing metadata entries often shifts to semi-clerical workers who know little about the subject matter. Weibel states the problem this way: "The idea of user-created metadata is seductive. Creating metadata early in the life cycle of an information asset makes sense, and who should know the content better than its creator? Creators also have the incentive of their work being more easily found – who wouldn't want to spend an extra few minutes with so much already invested? The answer is that almost nobody will spend the time, and probably the majority of those who do are in the business of creating metadata-spam. Creating good quality metadata is challenging, and users are unlikely to have the knowledge or patience to do it very well, let alone fit it into an appropriate context with related resources. Our expectations to the contrary seem touchingly naïve in retrospect. The challenge of creating cost-effective metadata remains prominent. As Erik Duval pointed out in his DC-2004 keynote, 'Librarians don't scale' [7]. We need automated (or at least, hybrid) means for creating metadata that is both useful and inexpensive."
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http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/weibel/07weibel.html
Rarely do you get a chance to read reflections by someone with as much experience as Stuart L. Weibel, the Senior Research Scientist with OCLC, on 10 years of work around Dublin Core and digital metadata standards. And frank too - he concedes that we've all perhaps been too optimistic about the 'author contributed' model of metadata submission, and also that metadata in general has to find its place (if it has one at all) in the full-text searchable digitized world of the web. Check out also the great pictures of the bogeys (wheel carriages) that move entire trains between railway lines of different gauges between China and Mongolia. - SWL [EdTechPost]
10:35:27 AM 
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