Choose Your Own Adventure (and/or Blog Post Topic)!

For this week's blog post, I am choosing to write about what I felt was the most interesting part of my research into Folksonomies: metadata. More specifically, how it has been used in libraries and how it has been used (and not used) on the Internet.

Apparently, metadata was included as part of the original proposal for the Internet, which was envisaged as “a collection of organized, linked ideas.” While a structured system such as this would have made accessing and navigating the early Internet infinitely more efficient and effective, metadata was initially absent from the Internet because it’s designers felt that “the flexibility and simplicity of the Web was more important to its early users than the maintenance of a strict structure.”

Metadata did eventually find its way onto the Internet, however, as it continued to grow in popularity during the end of the previous millennium and the beginning of the current one. Marcel Gordon attributes this eventual inclusion of metadata by the Internet to two particular Internet innovations: “First, search engines began to map the Web, introducing what is now the Web’s primary interface.” These search engines, recognizing that metadata could be used to organize the Web, “began to use identity metadata such as titles and keywords in assessing the relevance of a page to a given query.” Accordingly, metadata’s importance to the Internet increased exponentially.

The second innovation was that not long after the appearance of search engines, commercial interests also appeared on the Web. In response, to the increasing use of metadata by search engines, “commercial Web site operators supplied false metadata about their pages to ensure that they appeared more frequently in search results and attracted more users.” As a result, metadata was essentially removed from the Internet once again because it had become “untrustworthy and effectively useless, depriving the Web of this powerful information management tool.”

Today, of course, metadata has returned to the Internet once again with the development and popularity of Web 2.0, which allows users to not only browse the Internet but to actively contribute to it by contributing original online content…just like I’m doing right now!

To learn more about the history of metadata use on the Internet and in libraries, and about how metadata is being used today in this wonderful Web 2.0 world, be sure to read Marcel Gordon’s article “Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach.” As always, here’s the citation:

Gordon, M. (2006). Cleaning metadata on the World Wide Web: Suggestions for a regulatory approach. The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law, 531-570.