Mary Aycock recently completed a five-week, online course in shareable metadata titled “Metadata for You and Me.” With aggregated repositories such as OAIster.org becoming more popular, ensuring that your metadata is shareable assumes greater importance. A classic example cited by Robin Wendler at Harvard concerns a record of a photo she encountered in an aggregated collection titled “On a horse.” Such a general title provides little information to a researcher regarding what the photo is. However, learning what local collection the photo came from provides the key to unlock the context: a collection of photos of Theodore Roosevelt (thus, the photo features Theodore Roosevelt on a horse). Shareable metadata find ways to address how to bridge the gap between what is sufficient in a local collection versus the needs of a wider universe.
This course will help support Mary’s work in developing metadata guidelines for MOspace.