Monday, March 06, 2006
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Administrative Metadata
Administrative metadata is descriptive information about the creating and managing of information assets like author, creation date, etc. The most well known standard for tracking this type of information is the dublin core metadata initiative.
The good news is that this type of metadata is well-understood, fairly easy to implement and even partially supported in most editing applications like MS Word, Photoshop, etc.
The bad news is that this type of metadata is so ubiquitous that it is intimidating to manage and therefore seen by many managers as overkill. Think of the number of records required in a metadata repository to catalog all the administrative metadata on every document, diagram, photo and report created in your organization. It is a scary proposition for large organizations and if you cannot cleary define the benefit gained from such management, such an undertaking is dead-on-arrival. So, unless you control the digital production process (and some organization's do) where this step can be automated or semi-automated, I do not recommend you try to capture this metadata. That brings us to the ugly...
Several recent stories (here and here), have highlighted the danger of unmanaged and sometimes hidden metadata in photos and documents that embarrass the organizations that created them. Does this mean we are back to recommending storage of all administrative metadata to eliminate such gaffes? No. It means that organization's do need to be aware of the metadata that editing programs store and then determine which digital data are important enough to require control of the production process.
A good resource would be a listing of all the metadata stored by current popular editing tools... if you know of such a resource (or have time to develop one), please let me know.
The good news is that this type of metadata is well-understood, fairly easy to implement and even partially supported in most editing applications like MS Word, Photoshop, etc.
The bad news is that this type of metadata is so ubiquitous that it is intimidating to manage and therefore seen by many managers as overkill. Think of the number of records required in a metadata repository to catalog all the administrative metadata on every document, diagram, photo and report created in your organization. It is a scary proposition for large organizations and if you cannot cleary define the benefit gained from such management, such an undertaking is dead-on-arrival. So, unless you control the digital production process (and some organization's do) where this step can be automated or semi-automated, I do not recommend you try to capture this metadata. That brings us to the ugly...
Several recent stories (here and here), have highlighted the danger of unmanaged and sometimes hidden metadata in photos and documents that embarrass the organizations that created them. Does this mean we are back to recommending storage of all administrative metadata to eliminate such gaffes? No. It means that organization's do need to be aware of the metadata that editing programs store and then determine which digital data are important enough to require control of the production process.
A good resource would be a listing of all the metadata stored by current popular editing tools... if you know of such a resource (or have time to develop one), please let me know.
