Here are five things for this crisp autumn week:
- Learn about the data triplets in relation to research and surveys. Apparently, paradata refers to the way data was collected - for example, the amount of time it takes a survey participant to answer a question.
- How can you make your content more nimble with metadata? From HTML meta tags to sneaking Dublin Core into your code, this article is a helpful primer on what matters in making your content more flexible and findable.
- Interested in an open-source solution for cultural heritage institutions? Check out Delving - a growing set of tools for metadata mapping, harvesting, storage and retrieval, and a web-interface for managing and publishing data for online use.
- From the records management community, a really basic and helpful article on how metadata works. These folks rely a lot on folder structure which is covered as well as rudimentary information on making sure files have classification, keywords, etc.
- Is reference out of fashion? This post talks about the decline of reference. Frankly, I took an entire semester on reference and I don't even feel that we scratched the surface so to have it fall by the wayside seems a bad move in library school circles.
Most of the things that data triplet post describe as "paradata" strike me as things NISO have already defined as structural or administrative metadata concepts in their excellent "Understanding Metadata" booklet. The length of a survey question response is structural metadata, for example. And I think time to complete a survey or reaction time to a question could be considered technical details about specific survey instances, they seem like administrative metadata to me. As such, I'm not convinced that "paradata" is a useful or clarifying concept, in fact, it seems to me that it's muddling concepts already clearly defined by a standards organization...That said, looking around for other definitions of paradata, I like the one at http://nsdlnetwork.org/stemexchange/paradata because it focuses on how the content is used, in ways that seem to go beyond traditional administrative provenance metadata. I'm less of a paradata skeptic after seeing this definition, but I'm going to be thinking about this for a while.
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