Resolving the confusion over metadata-creation in digital archives

Abstract

Metadata is a growing concern in every sphere of information management, especially for libraries worldwide. Indeed the Internet has rigorously prompted the revitalization of metadata with more sustainable framework to obtain the efficient discovery of resources for reuse. This paper aims to present a bird’s-eye view on metadata creation, thus provide glimpses of diverse opinions in producing structured metadata consistently across the digital repositories. It recognizes the obvious inquiries viz. how to create metadata; whether it can be created manually (using human-intellectual efforts) or by automatic means; who is responsible to create it; are they resource-authors or metadata-professionals; who can produce better quality metadata. Discussion brings out a few paradoxical views on the process of metadata creation and responsibilities by the concerned players. The paper dwells on a variety of practices having their own merits and arguments, and draws attention to the responsibility of metadata creation, a fuzzy area. The paper argues that best results could be achieved by integrating both automatic and manual efforts. Finally, better possible ways of metadata creation are suggested.