I have just begun ETL505 – Describing and Analysing Education Resources and if I am honest the title made me feel that it was going to be a pretty dry subject and went into reading the first chapter of the prescribed text (Hider, P. (2018). Information resource description: Creating and managing metadata (2nd ed.). London: Facet.) with a little trepidation, given that I did not even really have a sound understanding of what metadata actually was.
I found myself not finding the content as dry as I thought, perhaps in part due to Hider’s writing style but also due to the content.
It is obvious that information needs to be organised so that it can be easily retrieved and searched and that descriptors of items certainly make locating and identifying items easier and certainly as the quantity of information/resources constantly increase online ease of location and identification becomes even more paramount.
My biggest aha moment so far has been that metadata is simply ‘information about information’. It may not be an epiphany for everyone else, but it was for me! As we search for something, we use metadata to locate and evaluate what we find.