In a world where library metadata is harvested, mashed up, aggregated, and contributed by users, do we need to pay more attention to meta-metadata? Good question. Of course, we do some of this already, but most meta-metadata is considered to be administrative or technical information that's not exposed to our users. That could change in the future.
All this is worth thinking about and is addressed by Fran who writes at VocabControl in a recent post, The power of parametadata.
Parametadata (or meta-metadata) is another subset of metadata – it is the metadata about the metadata, giving its provenance, date of creation, technical specifications, etc. Once you start to think about metadata as content in its own right, it becomes obvious that just as you wish to track the author, title, and so on of the core content, so too you need to track the author(s), provenance, date of creation and latest update of the metadata as well. For subjective metadata, parametadata becomes hugely useful. Because you can have multiple classifications of an asset, it is very important to track the source – distinguishing between author added keywords, indexer keywords, and folksonomic tags, for example – so that people can tell where a tag has come from.
h/t LISNews
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