Library of Congress and Katamari Damancy

Interesting article on the Library of Congress plans for using metadata to improve the accessibility of content.

“To address the challenges in this area, the “Metadata for Digital Content” group was formed at the Library in March 2009. This internal, cross-Library group is working towards new solutions, aligning with a goal in the Library’s overall strategic plan to provide better access to digital materials. The group is co-chaired by Rebecca Guenther and Ann Della Porta from the Technology Policy Directorate of the Library.”

“Jane Mandelbaum, manager in the Library’s Information Technology directorate and a founder of the group, said the group is focusing on “how we build standardized metadata that works across the spectrum of digital objects.”

That is a great opportunity for using XMP as a standardize way of embedding metadata information into a number of different digital objects.  Standardization leads to efficiency and lower costs of maintenance and ownership.  It also creates a standard platform that the industry can build upon for interoperability in metadata based transactions.

“In support of the Library’s goal for increased access, the group hopes to accomplish three objectives. First, recommend a common set of metadata elements for current and future uses. Second, provide more consistent metadata for access and use of the digital objects and recommend how it should be managed. And third, develop recommendations for providing metadata for digital objects that currently have none or little metadata.”

Great thing about XMP is that it is schema neutral – which means that you can create any namespace to represent your data and have it preserved in the file.  A namespace is simple a list of properties that you are interested in within a specific scope or domain – that latter is critical in understanding the value of namespaces.  Often the semantics of a property are slightly different across different domains – for example the property “color” may be defined as human perceived values “red, green, blue” or web based values “CC6633″ or thermal temperature.

Consistent ways in managing and using metadata is factor of managing complexity since there will always be multiple sources of metadata.  Again XMP has a great advantage in that it simplifies one dimension of the problem – namely providing a consistent way to access metadata across multiple digital media files. This is a big deal because each file format has it’s own way of storing data and metadata.  Provide a standardized way of doing this is like adding barcodes to replace a myriad of pricing stickers on physical goods.  The analogy extends to downstream processes such as check out – since the meta information is accessible in a standardized way, the goods move faster, and are tracked more easily across the supply chain or wherever the media is made accessible.

Managing media with no metadata is a result of the media not being “sticky” to the information that is around it.  One should take the Katamari Damancy approach to developing a strategy. Katamari Damancy is Japanese video game in which a magical ball allows anything smaller than it to stick to it and make it grow – a digital tumbleweed.  The player then navigates the ball picking everything in it’s path.  Similarly for digital media, one needs to ensure that the media has a unique way of identifying itself and an infrastructure to capture related information.  XMP has a number of internal unique ids that it uses, primarily with Adobe products – one can also create their own ids.  As for the information that is captured, it can either be “stuck” inside the file as XMP or referenced to an external source or both.  Managing that balance is really the core of the strategy.

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