[quote="jackiewickham"] [quote="ssalonso"] [quote="jackiewickham"] There are two main purposes for metadata - to enable people to discover things and to enable machines to talk to each other. (Well perhaps three if you count metadata that supports preservation and administration - or is that four?).... [/quote] Well, in my opinion, from a teacher's perspective the most important thing about metadata is that it helps me to select the resources I need without inspecting all the elements in veeeeeeeeeeeeery long lists of educational resources. But if you want to get it like this, your metadata must be good, descriptive and apropriate for everyone. If also multilingual, you will guarantee the ssame benefits for a wider audience. Metadata descriptions like "A photo of an organic farm" are useless, so if this is what we are prepared to put in, let's forget about. Instead, comprehensive, detailed, standard-complinat metadata are pricesless!! Regards, Salvador [/quote] Thanks Salvador. It's really important to get the user's view - that's the point of creating the metadata in the first place. It would be interesting to find out from you which of the metadata elements are the most useful. Earlier this year, I did some work on a multi-institutional project in the UK which aimed to "free" educational resources created in universities (our project covered medicine, dentistry and veterinary science). Not surprisingly, I worked on the metadata workstream alongside a colleague, David Davies, from Warwick University. We ran a survey and focus groups to ask teachers what metadata was important for them in discovery and assessment of resources. http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/SummerSchool2010/Presentations/Resource%20discovery.pdf There were some interesting results. For example, "When choosing a learning resource, how influenced are you by those who created it? There was a 50:50 split between those who thought it important and those who didn't. In the focus groups, there was a strong view that the teachers wanted to evaluate their own resources - so the key metadata was good keywords and a short but high quality description. [/quote] I attended an interesting meeting in the UK this week - "What Metadata Is Realy Useful?" http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Event:_what_metadata_is_really_required Dr Bob Strunz of the Irish National Learning Repository outlined their approach to deciding on what metadata was needed for learning objects deposited in their repository. Basically, they began by asking users (teachers and learners) what they wanted to be able to do with items - e.g. how they wanted to search, how and why they would be looking for material. From this, some use case scenarios were created and then worked through to create a basic framework of 'essential' metadata. The other point Bob made was that, for this repository, no-one was being paid to enter metadata, so it was essential that the right balance between simplicity and good metadata was maintained.