Week 4 readings

Whenever I talked to people outside the LIS profession and mention metadata, they always look at me. Then I explain what metadata is and they look at me a little oddly. I guess to others metadata seems odd even though I think most other fields have data about data. Maybe it's just because as librarians we like to categorize everything and give it names that seems so odd to people.

When I first read about Dublin Core I really liked the idea of it. My main interest is to work in a museum library and it seemed like the perfect tool to organize museum information and make it transferable between museums, but the more I've worked with museum objects the harder Dublin Core is to use. The 15 descriptors do make things easier, but a lot of times with these objects there is so much more to explain or describe than Dublin Core can handle. In its place I've been using a system called Cataloguing Cultural Objects. It's a newer cataloguing system that is more complex than Dublin Core, but so far it has served me well. Does anyone have thoughts about fewer descritpors and if they will serve us better in the future? I guess it goes along with minimum level cataloguing and such.