SciTechSociety: The Metadata Bubble

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-05

Summary:

" ... Institutional repositories have yet to build similar broad-based enthusiastic constituencies. Yet, many Open Access advocates believe that the decentralized approach of institutional repositories creates a more scalable system with a higher probability for long-term survival. The campaign to enact institutional deposit mandates hopes to jump start an Open Access virtuous cycle for all scholarly disciplines and all institutions. The risk of such a campaign is that it may backfire if scholars should experience Open Access as an obligation with few benefits. For long-term success, most scholars must perceive their compelled participation in Open Access as a positive experience. It is, therefore, crucial that repositories become essential scholarly resources, not dark archives to be opened only in case of emergency. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) repository design provided what was thought to be the necessary architecture. Unfortunately, we are far from realizing its anticipated potential. The Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows service providers to harvest any metadata in any format, but most repositories provide only minimal Dublin Core metadata, a format in which most fields are optional and several are ambiguous. Extremely few repositories enable Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), which allows for complex inter-repository services through the exchange of multimedia objects, not just metadata about them. As a result, OAI-enabled services are largely limited to the most elementary kind of searches, and even these often deliver unsatisfactory results, like metadata-only placeholder records for works restricted by copyright or other considerations ... The metadata approach is obsolete for an even more fundamental reason. Metadata are the digital extension of a catalog-centered paper-based information system. In this kind of system, today's experts organize today's information so tomorrow's users may solve tomorrow's problems efficiently. This worked well when technology changed slowly, when experts could predict who the future users would be, what kind of problems they would like to solve, and what kind of tools they would have at their disposal. These conditions no longer apply.  When digital storage is cheap, why implement expensive selection processes for an archive? When search technology does not care whether information is excruciatingly organized or piled in a heap, why spend countless hours organizing and curating content? Why agonize over potential future problems with unreadable file formats? Preserve all the information about current software and standards, and start developing the expert systems to unscramble any historical format. Think of any information-management task. How reasonable is the proposition that this task will require direct human intervention in two years? In five years? In ten years?  For content, more is more. We must acquire as much content as possible, and store it safely.  For content administration, less is more ..."

Link:

http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-metadata-bubble.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.ir oa.green oa.metadata oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.curation oa.preservation oa.oai-pmh oa.oai-ore oa.harvesting oa.indexing oa.interoperability oa.repositories

Date tagged:

10/05/2014, 07:56

Date published:

10/05/2014, 03:56