'The Wink that's Worth a Thousand
Words': A Contemplation on the
Nature of Metadata and Metadata
Practices in the Archival World
Overview
As with the term 'information', 'metadata' is both ubiquitous and applied in so
many ways in this digital age that without conceptual analysis and close operational
definition, while it may be intuitively understood, it is essentially expressively
useless. This paper addresses questions about what is to be gained philosophically
and practically from a discursive examination of metadata by archival science and
other recordkeeping fields, which play crucial cultural, memory, evidentiary and
information roles in society. It argues that philosophically and phenomenologically
such an examination is important because, visibly or invisibly, metadata is a factor
that is at work in all systems and services that support such roles, and is also
embedded in and envelopes every type of informational, evidentiary and cultural
resource with which these fields engage. After a preliminary discussion about the
definition of metadata, this paper briefly reviews the history of metadata in
archival science and recordkeeping more broadly. From there it contemplates, with
illustrations, the concept of metadata in terms of its various and expanding
conceptualizations and instantiations, as well as some ethical, political and
emerging concerns.
Introduction
British producer, musician and artist Brian Eno, participating in a panel discussion
at the Time Bits: Managing Digital Continuity conference organized by the Getty
in 1998, talked of "the wink that's worth a thousand words the wink at the right
moment, which everybody knows what it means, but it's much too complicated to
explain" (McLean Davis, p. 51). Eno was metaphorically alluding to the under-
explicated, yet widely used term 'metadata', and his comment continues to provoke
fundamental questions about what is to be gained either philosophically or
practically from a discursive examination of metadata. Scholars in library and
information science (LIS) have engaged in extensive philosophical treatments of the
nature of information-Buckland's (1991) discussion of information-as-process,
information-as-knowledge and information-as-thing, and Furner's (2014)
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