Reading notes for reading- September 29 class

Introduction to Metadata reading

Of particular interest to me this week within the assigned readings was the topic of social bookmarking and user-generated metadata. Although I have had experience with metadata within an archival setting, the concept of social bookmarking and user-generated metadata were completely unknown to me prior to when I started the program.

I think that Gilliland makes an interesting point in her discussion of user-generated metadata. I found her juxtaposition of how small groups of people use metadata against information professionals and their metadata creation to be particularly thought-provoking. The notion that this small group of people could shape the metadata to their personal interests in a more effective manner than those professionals who receive metadata systems with ready-set fields and vocabularies is at the same time both intuitive and revolutionary. At the same time however, I appreciate how she takes the time to also address the potential drawbacks of user-generated metadata- such as a lack of quality control.

In addition, I also thought that Gilliland's discussion of metadata and the information life cycle to be interesting as well. We have discussed the notion of the records life cycle in other courses but I never thought of how the metadata associated with records could be affected by the stage of the record's life cycle.