Had an e-mail from my brother this morning. He asked a pointed question:
“What the bloody hell is a metadatum?”
Good question. I never thought about it in the singular before. Anyway, inspiration struck as I struggled to answer him, so I thought I would share it for anyone trying to explain to their own dummies …er, friends and relatives — what metadata is:
Ah, metadata. Metadata is the blood and soul of digital content. It’s what makes all those ones and zeros MEAN something. Google it.
Okay, okay: the classic definition is “data about data.” Its the descriptive info that identifies what’s actually in that digital photograph, or eBook, or music file or video file — after all, all digitial files look the same when they’re closed. Think of it as the ID of the digital file, or the name tag like at a conference. “Hi! I’m Mona Lisa in .TIFF format digital capture Canon EOS 11.6.09 from the Louvre photo archive, photo copyright RMN.” Well, it’s actually a lot longer than that, and of course it varies from one content form to another. Or think of it this way: a book in a library is a book, but the card in the card catalog that records it and makes it searchable and “points” to it is the metadata. You catalog stuff using metadata. What’s written about me in my passport is the metadata about me. What’s written in the seed catalog is the metadata about the various seeds you can purchase; if you bought a bunch of seeds with no accompanying metadata on the seed packet, you wouldn’t know what you’re planting. If they were digital, you wouldn’t even know they are seeds. Go to any file on your computer, right click and chose “Properties.” That’s metadata.
All of which you will now recall from your programming days — only it was probably called something else back then in the Chalcolithic era.
My brother, you see, was a population studies programmer at the University of Michigan, back in the mainframe Dark Ages. (I do wonder what passed for metadata in those ancient days?) Today, he mostly hikes around Spain and New Zealand, reporting back on the local spirits and brews.
Wise man, my brother.
