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I think one of the big things to keep in mind about metadata
is that it's important to use the standard encoding.
That will allow for that metadata to be captured,
to be preserved, to be used, and made interoperable
so that it can be easily moved between systems.
So we talk about, say, a researcher has this homegrown
system that they have their data in, and at some point
they want to move that to something else.
It's going to be very hard to do that when the data won't
necessarily match up between the systems.
This is a common problem with migrating from any platform
to a newer platform.
Having a standard approach to how
you encode that information, one that is accepted and understood
by other practitioners in that area, can help
enable the reuse and the movement
of that metadata over time.
Also, it's important to keep in mind
that metadata itself is data.
Say, an audio file that's capturing
some aspect of your research, if you
don't preserve the metadata that describes
what that audio file is over time, it might be hard 10,
20 years down the road to understand what that object is
if a researcher comes across it.
Or to identify what that is.
And so we need to take good practices
with how we store our metadata as well.
I see this all the time.
You know, I get disks like this that I
will plug into my machine and my machine
won't know what format a file is on there.
It won't be able to recognize it.
I can run it through a format registry
that documents like thousands of formats
and it still might not recognize that format.
And it's just because it's obsolete
or it was very specialized at the time
and not many people used it.
And so it's a complete mystery now
what file that is, what kind of file it is, and what software
it takes to render it.
So preservation metadata can help document certain things
about the digital objects that were created,
about the data that was created, about how it was managed,
about the tools used to create it and render it that you want
to keep attached to that object over time
so that you have a better chance of rendering it later.