Metametametadata

First entry

To state the painfully obvious, this is the first entry of this journal and a test of its functionality.

It is still very much a work in progress

My goal in writing here is to record, admittedly for myself, interesting bits of data that I encounter. By interesting I mean those bits that seem to want to cohere into things called information. I intend for this space to supplement and organize the notes I keep in a Moleskine.

I call this log metametadata because I am a digital librarian and a metadata specialist. I provide data about data every waking minute of my life. Hence, the Moleskine, then www.metametadata.net. It seems appropriate to me that I at least attempt to make use of the latest telecommunications technology in my lifelong pursuit of that most elusive of objects, knowledge.

In other words I am trying to find out what the hell is really going on.

I hope that librarians get the joke in this log's title. There is a widely used metadata scheme for educational materials, appropriately called the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard (IEEE standard 1484.12.1). This scheme consists of metadata elements in nine categories, the third of which is "Metametadata" and has the following explanation in the standard:

This category describes this metadata record itself (rather than the learning object that this record describes).
This category describes how the metadata instance can be identified, who created this metadata instance, how, when, and with what references.
NOTE:--This is not the information that describes the learning object itself.