The above (and completely unexpected) quote illustrates the massive importance of metadata and how it can be used. Allison Jai O'Dell in her article, Big Metadata: Mining Special Collections Catalogs for New Knowledge talks about how special collection catalogues are full of metadata that can be used for research. But for that to happen the catalogues have to be thought of as big metadata which in turn can be data mined. She points out that it will be a lot of work but the information is there and it just have to be organized.
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| http://copyrightuser.org/topics/text-and-data-mining/ |
I have never really thought of library catalogues as a form of metadata before, but it does make a good bit of sense. The aforementioned quote, which comes from the article, made me do a double take, but after the second reading I realized that Michael Hayden was correct. A lot can be learned of someone by the information that is innocuously put out everyday.
1 comment:
Good work! You make some excellent points, including the realization that, essentially, library catalogers have been working with "metadata" for many many decades :)
Another great point is noting that in essence, metadata is really just data with a fancy name ... this opens up all kinds of data mining and data analytics opportunities for librarians and their data! (keeping in mind library user privacy, of course ... we don't want to get anyone killed!)
Dr. MacCall
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