Metadata isn’t a new thing. As with plenty of other concepts, people are already using it in some capacity, but likely without realizing it. Most notably though, metadata is heavily used by libraries, eCommerce sites, social media, and streaming platforms. Depending on the scenario, people may use metadata interchangeably with words like attribute, property, tag, or label.
Often described as being “information about information” or “data explaining data“, metadata in any form accomplishes the same thing. It helps people better organize, sort, group, filter, and report on their content. For instance, imagine someone needing to find a very, very specific book at their local bookstore. How would they do so without a book title? They could look by author, the publisher, or genre, then refine their results, which is only possible because the book has metadata associated with it. Metadata makes searching these large volumes of data easier…
E.g., use hashtags and handles to search on Twitter.
E.g., search by title, category, actor, or genre on Netflix:
Now, most people would agree that metadata is important, if not vital to long-term productivity. But many businesses are still hosting their documents on traditional file shares. Unfortunately, the legacy systems can’t take full advantage of metadata. There are some generic document properties available like type, author, date modified, and size, but building a modern metadata structure necessitates much more.
Short of opening each and every file, people can only learn so much about the file from its name or path. Historically, people have created their files with extremely long, descriptive names. Or created deeply nested, descriptive folder hierarchies. Though some people do both, which promises to cause problems, like generate file path length errors:
E.g., file share with generic file type, size, and modified date properties.
Even with just a smidgen of metadata, content repositories are noticeably more efficient. At a glance, people likely can’t see which departments a file belongs to. Or tell when it was last reviewed. But with a few metadata fields, this can be easily identified. Along with whether the document has been archived or not!
Bonus to improved document organization, metadata feeds business intelligence. Tools like Power BI can report on department storage size, archiving rates, and help identify document ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial):
E.g., SharePoint document library with custom department, archived, and last reviewed date properties.
Conclusion:
Be more intentional with documents and leverage metadata. This improves content organization, feeds business intelligence, and opens the door for future automations…
“I will not take ‘but’ for an answer.”
Langston Hughes
#BlackLivesMatter
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