Metadata by Jeffrey Pomerantz. Jeffrey earned his Ph.D. from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He is Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and in addition a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington.
At first glance, one may consider this book is only for Library Science and Information Technology students and professionals. However, today internet publishing and content creators suggests you would be wrong.
In fact, this book is very essential. I found this a very welcoming and informative read. Above all, metadata is addressing traditional data elements: creator, created, modified, name, and related networks.
Jeremy elegantly explains what metadata is and why this is so critical to our society today. Twenty years ago the audience impact was considerably smaller. However, today we are an internet publishing society and this is now second nature to many social media content creators.
Jeremy introduces this key element via the Snowden revelations regarding PRISM. The collection of phone metadata reveals the NSA could identify quite a bit about each cellular call. This was certainly metadata’s aha moment on a global scale. However, this subject really shines in Bruce Schneier’s excellent book Click Here to Kill Everybody. I would also highly recommend reading Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine.
Dublin Core
Revisiting Dublin Core was a welcomed memory. It is very pleasing to see Jeremy addressing the impact of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. This immediately cemented this book to my ‘must read’ category. In addition addressing schema.org is just as important to understand across our digital society. In explaining Dublin Core, the reader will gain understanding to how important metadata sources really play on a semantic web.
The more records about more entities that can be connected together, the richer the knowledge represented online can be.
pg. 174
Readers will learn how metadata is actually everywhere. In conclusion, Jeremy delivers a compact, wonderfully insightful book. This is not to be missed.