Monday Morning Blog

There hasn't been much new in the library world of metadata to report on or discuss over the summer.  I think that most of us have been busying learning, updating and applying much of what I have discussed already.  Of course, there was an update to RDA early in July but in the big scheme of all of the change that has been happening, things have been relatively quiet. However, it appears that since late spring the popular media, particularly in the U.S., has become quite interested in the topic of metadata.  I know that I have heard stories on CBC radio more than once where metadata has been the topic of discussion.  One of the big questions that comes up is what metadata is.  So, it is a term that has worked its way into the vocabulary of many North Americans even if most are still not entirely clear as to what it means.  I think that a summary of how the media is describing it is  "it is not actually our phone conversations themselves but informati...

There haven't been a lot of news on the metadata front for libraries over the summer.  While people have been busy learning and applying the new standards, reading the updates, and being busy catching up on things in general, we haven't seen much that is entirely new.  However, there has been a lot of buzz about metadata in the popular, especially U.S., media about metadata and how it can be collected and used by governments and others to track what we do and what our relationships are. Here is a 6 minute pod-cast from NPR radio which talks about both the U.S. government use of metadata and cell phone calls and how even our gmail metadata can be used to get a sense of what a person's relationships are and how they are progressing: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/22/214172709/how-a-look-at-your-gmail-reveals-the-power-of-metadata If you were able to do my mini-MOOC, you will likely see that there is some similarity between the sorts of conclusions th...