How do you keep your metadata skills and knowledge up to date and relevant in a changing environment?

1 Why preserve metadata?

Preserving metadata means ensuring that it is accurate, complete, and accessible over time. This can help you avoid data loss, corruption, or misuse. It can also help you comply with legal, ethical, and professional requirements. For example, some data may have privacy, security, or copyright restrictions that need to be documented and respected. Preserving metadata can also enhance the value and impact of your data, as it can make it more discoverable, reusable, and citable by others.

4 How to curate metadata?

Periodic reviews of metadata are essential for ensuring accuracy, consistency, and completeness. It's important to update metadata to reflect any changes or additions to data. Enhancing your metadata with more descriptive, contextual, or semantic information can help improve its quality. Aligning metadata with current standards, best practices, and user needs is also recommended. There are tools and services available to help validate, enrich, or transform your metadata. Finally, don't forget to share your metadata with relevant stakeholders and solicit feedback.

5 Where to learn more?

To stay informed on metadata preservation and curation, there are several options available. For instance, you can take online courses or workshops, such as those provided by the Digital Curation Centre, the Research Data Alliance, or the Library Juice Academy. Additionally, you can read books, articles, blogs, or newsletters on metadata trends, issues, and solutions from sources like the International Journal of Digital Curation, the Metadata 2020 project, or the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Joining professional associations or networks that focus on metadata standards, practices, and education is also beneficial - organizations like the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Metadata Interest Group, or the DataCite Community are great resources. Finally, events or forums that showcase metadata innovations, challenges, and opportunities can be helpful too - consider attending the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, the Metadata and Semantics Research Conference, or tuning into the Metadata Matters webinar series.