Metadata Matters!

This is a picture of the Eymard Seminary baseball team from Suffern, New York, taken sometime between 1890 and 1910. Eymard scored a run in the 12th inning to win the game.

The only reason I know this stuff (except the winning run part; that's obvious) about a photo taken over 100 years ago is metadata.

It drives me crazy when I'm at thrift stores, and I find a basket of awesome old photos but there is nothing written on the back. No names, no dates, no information about what the photo is of. I mean, part of it's fun, because you can make up your own stories about the people in the photos (what, you don't do that?), but it's mostly frustrating.

The metadata class I'm taking right now is revealing to me the importance of accurate labeling. Not only for the purpose of recall and ease of use, but for posterity. It's especially important in today's digital age, where we have photo file names like DSC012894. So not descriptive! So not helpful for finding that photo or explaining to our great-great-grandchildren what it's a photo of. I don't want to be cursed by future generations for failing to properly label and tag my files!

Another MLIS candidate in my program has a great post on her blog about personal digital preservation, including labeling your files with appropriate metadata. Check it out! It's definitely inspired me to do some work on my own files.

All this talk about metadata also makes me think about how I tag my blog posts, and how I search for things online. I'd like to just snap my fingers (I can't not link to this. I tried, and I can't.) and have everything in the whole world labeled nicely. I guess that can't happen. But I can do my part!

How do you feel about metadata? (Easily the nerdiest question ever blogged.) Do you care about labels and tags?

How Can You Not Have a Website???

Originally, this post was going to be about my trip to Julian, a little old-fashioned, touristy mining town in the hills, and how I visited with some guys from their historical society, and how cool their work is, and how they're digitizing all their stuff. But then I Googled Julian Historical Society to get some info/pictures to use for said post and found out that they don't have a website. Just a blurb on the Julian Chamber of Commerce website,which is, itself, rather... quaint. I was kind of shocked. Even the cemetery has a webpage (literally, one page).

It led me to wonder what exactly they're planning to do with all the data they're digitizing, and how they're going to make it accessible.

It also got me thinking about how the internet has changed marketing and consumption. If you don't have a web presence, you might as well not exist. I, the consumer, cannot find you (OK, full disclosure: I did find a mailing address for the historical society. So I guess I could get in touch with them. But that would require buying stamps.) and because I am a product of a fast-paced, gimme-gimme society, when you don't show up on Google, I give up.

Really, though. Historical societies are, like, my favorite thing. And they make me want to go into archives real bad. I just wish the Julian Historical Society had a way to check out what they're doing when I can't hang out in their little 100-year-old school house office. For now I'll have to make do with the San Diego History Center website. They have a cool historic photo collection.

Anyway, here's a photo of me in front of the Julian Library (which was closed, unfortunately) and cute boyfriend being cute.