What is Metadata Tagging?

Tagging your metadata (“data about your data and/or data containers”) is the key to proper classification of your assets in your archival system, in order to provide your employees, clients and prospects proper online identification and access to those assets. Metadata tags are typically words, images, terms and other identification markers that transform a simple image into a dynamic document. When we examine the benefits of metadata tagging in our personal lives, it’s easier for us to grasp the need, and the enormous benefits for metadata tagging our document images and digital assets within our businesses.

Metadata tagging is already part of our every day lives, helping us all find what we need quickly in the virtual marketplace. Some great examples of how metadata tags save us time and money are easily found in the online applications many of us now use every day, whether Google searches, or in the social and professional networks, Facebook and LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter (to name a few). All of these applications include metadata tags for our names, the companies we work for, our network of peers and friends, and our bibliographic information, our authorship of quotes, blogs, articles, books, photography, videos and art. These tags are commonly in the form of dynamic hypertext or web links, Internet book-marks and key-word tags. (Metadata tags, in the form of dynamic links, embedded above for your convenience, allowing us to access all five of these applications easily from this one document.) Metadata tags also enable us to type in a key-word or name into Google or other Internet search engines, and within seconds have an index listing and links to access 100s of documents and sites on that specific subject or person.  Metadata tags have literally changed our research time from days, weeks, perhaps months, to a rapid method for exploring documents and records, within a matter of seconds.

While libraries were already well positioned to convert their assets from the Dewey Decimal System to this dynamic digital environment early on, academic institutions, government agencies, and law firms weren’t far behind them. Today, it’s difficult to find any industry or specific business that hasn’t or won’t benefit from digitization and metadata tagging. Next week, join me as I explore specific examples of document imaging versus dynamic imaging with metadata tagging.

“I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.” – Thomas Friedman