Does metadata matter?

This is a 30 minute slidecast (using 130 slides), based on a seminar I gave to Eduserv staff yesterday lunchtime.  It tries to cover a broad sweep of history from library cataloguing, thru the Dublin Core, Web search engines, IEEE LOM, the Semantic Web, arXiv, institutional repositories and more.

It's not comprehensive - so it will probably be easy to pick holes in if you so choose - but how could it be in 30 minutes?!

The focus is ultimately on why Eduserv should be interested in 'metadata' (and surrounding areas), to a certain extent trying to justify why the Foundation continues to have a significant interest in this area.  To be honest, it's probably weakest in its conclusions about whether, or why, Eduserv should retain that interest in the context of the charitable services that we might offer to the higher education community.

Nonetheless, I hope it is of interest (and value) to people.  I'd be interested to know what you think.

As an aside, I found that the Slideshare slidecast editing facility was mostly pretty good (this is the first time I've used it), but that it seemed to struggle a little with the very large number of slides and the quickness of some of the transitions.

Comments

[Candy Schwartz]

I thought this was a well-paced and suitably general overview, and I will recommend it to my students in our beginning org class. And you got me on the 128 - I stopped at "goodbye", noticed it was 128, and the just had to look at the last two. I looked very quickly

[Irvin Flack]

Thanks very much for posting this. I think it's a great introduction to metadata and précis of a complicated history. Also very effective use of Slideshare. You've managed to boil down a lot of information to its essentials and made it entertaining as well. Cheers - Irvin

[Amy Ranger]

Brilliant! Thanks so much for sharing -- very useful overview.

[Sam Kome]

dir.yahoo.com, same as it ever was, still updated....