Week 4 Readings -- Metadata, Dublin Core, and Databases

I have to say, databases have never been an area that I've been enthralled with, nor bothered to learn much about other than the big names like Oracle and dBase. I had no idea that they had moved on to bigger and better things in the area of databases until reading this article. I'm still not sure what the bigger and better new databases do that the older versions didn't do, but assume we'll learn more about that in the lecture. My basic view of databases is that they are kind of like my external hard drive for my Mac where I store all of the big stuff I don't need right away. Clearly a necessity in our profession with the amount of digital information we are dealing with on a regular basis.

The next article on metadata was all new territory for me. As I understand it, metadata basically forms the backbone of digital information systems and search engines. Gilliland's article covered many different examples of metadata and different ways that people are interpreting it, but ultimately that is my understanding. Both Gilliland and Miller, who wrote about the Dublin Core Data Model, argue for moving towards some form of standards in order for systems to work properly. This obviously makes sense, but the question arises as to which system? I suppose there is a debate going on somewhere about which model is best...