 Hello and welcome to this webinar produced by the OpenCourseWare Consortium. I'm Clay Whipkey, the technical director of the consortium. And today we're going to talk about the what, why, and how of metadata. Some key points that we'll cover include what is metadata, why should we care, gathering and recording, putting metadata to good use, a little bit about the basic level of metadata that we would hope that people would be producing. And some possibilities for the future. But first let's talk about what metadata is. Metadata simply refers to information about information or information that just gives context to another piece of information. In the world of educational content we might be looking at resources like images, videos or courses. And the metadata might be pieces of information that describe the resource such as a title, author and subject. Some metadata is useful for consumers of content, or in other words real human beings. But one could argue that most metadata is primarily useful for interaction between computers. Generally computers are not able to infer meaning from content. So they have to be told explicitly why one piece of information is more important than another. Or how the two relate to each other. This need becomes more pronounced when dealing with images and video. To a computer an image is a collection of ones and zeros that do nothing more than tell a screen to make a pixel color red or green or blue etc. It cannot tell if the image pictures an apple or an orange unless that information is included specifically. So why should we care? Well metadata is important because it allows us to leverage technology to improve many tasks such as cataloging, searching and utilizing content. Imagine a library with books organized on shelves alphabetically by author last name. This kind of organization would be easy and straightforward if you know the author's last name. But what if you simply are looking for a topic? Imagine how difficult it would be to find information if you had to read or examine it in its entirety every time you searched for it. Without metadata this is the only way you could know if the content was related to your topic of interest. But what happens when metadata collection recording is neglected? Well your content is placed on a shelf in that library and the only people who ever find it are those who know exactly where to go to get it or who stumble upon it while browsing. Considering the time, effort and money that are put into the creation of educational content, this would seem to thwart the purposes of creating it in the first place. It is useless if people cannot learn from it or teach with it and it's probably unsustainable if it requires too much human involvement. On the other side having a rich set of recorded structured metadata enables you to utilize computers to make tasks like searching and cataloging extremely fast easy and effective. The investment during the creation process pays off exponentially in the long term as it drastically reduces the cost of some tasks in human time and money and creates many additional possible benefits at relatively nominal additional costs. A lot of metadata exists as natural properties of either the content itself or the process of creating it. When someone writes an essay the properties of author, date created, and format are automatically created. Sometimes the content is created for specific use like in a course and subsequently several pieces of metadata can be inherited such as course title or the subject. The primary issue is not trying to think of appropriate metadata it is if and how it is recorded but it doesn't have to be difficult if you make it part of the creation conversion process. You can develop or modify your institution's procedures so that recording metadata is simply part of that activity. It is simply a matter of filling out the same form to input a new course or add a new resource and then not skipping those additional fields to save a few minutes of time. For some properties there will never be an easier time in the life of an educational resource to know and record it. Who will ever know better which topics are covered in a lecture than the author? Record as much as you know and which your software allows. While in the immediate term there may not be a specific usage for all the metadata on an item having it recorded creates more opportunity and possibility than not having it. I've personally been involved with many conversations where innovative ideas are considered unrealistic because this kind of rich metadata is not consistently recorded and sometimes not recorded at all. While there are understandable pragmatic reasons for the lack of rich metadata we should be able to at least start with a basic level and I'll cover the idea of a basic level in just a bit.