'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can Increase Exposure and Visibility of Content

'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can Increase Exposure and Visibility of Content. OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRU/SRW, RSS is a well-written and clear 2006 "how to" guide by M. Moffat from the JISC-funded PerX Project about how properly structured metadata can increase the findability of web resources.

Comments

[Jonathan Grove]

I've only scanned this article, so apologies if I have missed something (and I'm no expert in this area), but the title and content of this article are misleading because 'all the web' search engines (like Google) ignore 'in page' metadata to avoid unscrupulous attempts to misrepresent page content, and I'm not convinced that Google would take much note of an OAI respository associated with a website either (but others will know more than I). The article is a useful primer, but it seems to me that the 'marketing' reference is a red herring. I'm of the view that use of metadata is only appropriate in certain situations, which is why we only recommend to clients in the libraries, museums and archives sector (and they'll often decide to avoid manually adding metadata because its too labour intensive). The bottom line is that for all but a few, inclusion of DC metadata isn't worth the hassle.

Comment from Seb - 3/9/2007. Others would agree with you. See, for example Cory Doctorow's acidly written 2001 http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm - Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, and this 2005 summary by Google - http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html - of the way metadata is used in web pages (part of a longer, but still brief, December 2005 analysis by Google of a sample of slightly over a billion documents - http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html - extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.