Conference thoughts on accessibility

           Many of the papers and discussions at the “Digital Frontiers” conference at the University of North Texas dealt with increasing archive visibility on the web. Build it and they will come might work for a movie baseball field, but may not be as successful for an archive or at least not successful enough. I mentioned schema.org last time as a website that provided terms used by web crawlers.  A web sharing site where some of the archives have experienced success is pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/). Exposure on twitter and facebook are obvious choices visibility.  Blogs are also commonly used to increase interest in an archival website or a particular collection.  The key, of course, to enhance access to your material is appropriate search terms through detailed metadata.

            The definition of metadata is “data about data.” Ridiculous I know.  There must be a better way to describe metadata.  Let’s see how I do.  It is really simple.  A metadata record is a catalogue record describing a digital object.  If you are old enough to remember library card catalogue records then you understand metadata. If you don’t remember card catalogues then consider that metadata provide the explanatory information about the digital object. - who wrote it if it is an article, the photographer for a photograph, a description of the photograph, people in the photograph and so on including information about the scan that created the digital object.  In other words, metadata are the summaries (data) behind the digital object that you are viewing, i..e. data (catalog record) about data (the digital object) if you will.   Anyway these summaries or records describing a digital object among other things enable search engines to find the object.   The more detailed and specific the metadata, the more likely that you can find the exact digital object that you want through a search engine.  An example of detailed metadata would be the listing of all the individuals in a photograph, a date, the place where the photograph was taken and so forth. Standardization of terms helps.  Archivists are working on that.  One important consideration is determination of who your audience will be.  Genealogists are interested in searching using names while a historian might be interested in a time period or subject.  Although understanding metadata as a concept is not difficult creating comprehensive metadata can be.  That will be archivists continuing challenge.