Meta... what?

One good thing about attending a local conference is running into people you have a passing aquaintance with and striking up surprisingly, interesting conversations. One colleague I ran into at the last conference I attended was Lisa. She works at a different campus than I do and we sort of knew each other but hadn't had the opportunity to chat. The short story is we were so interesting in our conversation that we made a date to talk some more. It turns out that she's really keen on metadata. What is metadata? Metadata comes from latin and is strictly defined as "data about data". Singularly unhelpful definition if you ask me! The way I understand it, not that I'm an expert, is that metadata is a way of describing things just like cataloguing. These things needing describing could be books, CD's, datafiles and web pages, collectively they are known as "information objects". There also appear different metadata standards (they call them initiatives) which can make life confusing. The one that the majority of people seem to have settled on is Dublin Core. Now being a web developer and a librarian I really appreciate how important metadata is in the proper indexing of web pages. Being basically lazy at heart I've let my 400+ web site go without incorporating consistent metadata. Do I hear a collective gasp? :) I could make up all kinds of excuses but at the root of the problem is the idea that I didn't have the time to learn enough about this phenomenon to do a proper job of it. In my conversation with Lisa, I explained my problem and she said "No problem, I'll send you a couple of sites". She sent the e-mail earlier today and rocked my little world. She also ensured I have enough work for a year! Dublin Core Metadata Template "This template lets you fill in fields and transforms your information into HTML-coded DC metadata that you can cut and paste into your code for any web pages you create. It's been around for a long time." (from Lisa) DCdot: Dublin Core metadata editor "This one is even easier. It gathers what metadata it can from the page and lets you edit it and resubmit to see the HTML description which you can then cut and paste." (from Lisa) Who knew it could be this easy? I don't have to read too much of anything, all I really have to do is think back to my cataloguing classes from library school and plug away at the task! I like it. However, if anyone knows of a very short, very non-geeky introduction to Dublin Core Metadata... could you send the info my way? It's probably time I fixed my web site. More Reading:

• Wikipedia: Metadata
• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• Introduction to Metadata (Getty Research Institute)