In my (probably) final post about making historical sources accessible, I would like to talk about metadata.

There has been a lot about metadata in the news recently with regard to new data retention rules for ISPs (Disclaimer: I work for one). Since even our Attorney-General Mr Brandis seems to have no real idea what metadata is I thought a recap might be in order.

Basically, metadata is additional information associated with a piece of data. As a practical example:

If you want to send an email to a friend saying "Gosh, Stephen Hart is a brilliant writer - you must read Cant, A Gentleman's Guide" (feel free to do this) there is extra information associated with it. Things like:

- Who the message is to
- Who the message is from
- What time it was sent
- Nerdy stuff like mail servers and routing information which you have absolutely no need to know about*

[* or, for pedants, about which you have absolutely no need to know]

None of this information has anything to do with your effort to convey my brilliance as a writer. It is 'meta' information or 'meta' data.

Having got that out of the way, let's move on to metadata for historical sources.

I touched on this back in Part IV on databases where you could filter results based on date. The date of publication is book metadata.

This sort of information is easy but you can do much more by adding categorization metadata. You do this currently with your own blog/tweets by adding subject tags, hashtags or whatever.

This is probably the single most useful thing you can do with your historical data. As an example, I went through every Cant term and put it into a category and subcategory - e.g. animals, occupations, sex (a popular one), transport and so forth.

http://www.pascalbonenfant.com/18c/cant/

Technically I haven't finished the job yet but, even on what I have done, a lot of people have written to say how useful they have found it. (Pats self on back, wrenching shoulder in the process)

This whole post fundamentally comes down to 'add as much extra information as you can particularly categories' and you most likely already knew that but it is useful to remind ourselves of the need and to make things easier for fellow researchers.

Use the term metadata liberally. Add it to the already long list of things you know about that our politicians don't. (I exempt Scott Ludlam, the Greens' Senator for Communications who actually knows quite a lot)

Thank you for your patience.