Reflective Blog Post on What is Metadata?

This week we learned about metadata and how to add categories to our websites. Simply put metadata provides information about the data that we encounter every day. Some examples we talked about were analog card catalogs at the library, LOC information lists, and the copyright page you can find at the front of books. I know for me it was surprising to hear about how much metadata I interact with every day and had no idea about. I began to look up different examples of metadata to see if I could find more that I interact with often or find interesting!

I found out about the metadata of a photo that can include things such as its height and width, in pixels, or the type of compression used to store it. I love photography and edit and work with pictures often so learning that I look at this type of metadata often was very interesting.

On my search, I found this really interesting article called ‘What is Metadata (with examples)! To start it has some typical metadata elements listed: title and description, tags and categories, who created and when, who last modified and when, and who can access or update. Then it begins talking about the different examples we can see in photos, books, blogs, email, word documents, spreadsheets, relational databases, computer files, web pages, and paper files. I like how it laid everything out with pictures because for me, a very visual learner, being able to see a photo with certain things highlighted as data and then others highlighted as the metadata helped to explain this concept to be better than anything.

Reading about all these different types of places metadata can be found, I began to think about all the books I read. Obviously, I know that the copyright page at the beginning is metadata but then I realized that the table of contents is also metadata! Similar to how we added categories to our websites some books even add categories to the table of contents. For example, some books separate chapters into part 1, part 2, and part 3, or some even come up with special names for the categories/sections of the book! I thought this was really interesting and I never would have thought about my favorite books like this if it hadn’t been for this class!

I really liked getting to add categories to our GitHub page this week because I am all about organization and I think it really just cleans everything up. While, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who organized their site like this, I added categories for the hands-on activities and for the reflective posts. As the course goes I’m sure I will add more as needed but I hope to be able to make the categories the main page of my site instead of just a link on the side. Hopefully, we learn how to do this in a later lesson because I think it would be super neat!

I can’t wait to continue learning more about coding and the details of making a blog every week!

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