Although the underlying purpose of metadata has been in use for far longer, the term and it’s digital application has only been practiced since the early 2000’s. In the past, rich documents, important historical artifacts, art and the like were all tracked manually. If scholars (and the cultures those scholars study) took care in documenting and preserving their history, metadata would be in the form of an archiving system—a system to categorize by context, content and structure. Modern day libraries, for example, use the Dewey decimal system (or one of the like) in order to track and sort their resources. Sometimes, information is not so well documented and tracked. In the case of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence, it took traveling to seven countries and digging through countless “lost” documents in order to track the original. Julia Gaffield, a Duke scholar who headed this mission, was able to uncover the declaration because of attention to metadata centering lost documents—each newly discovered piece served as a clue. Check out the full article of her mission here. Once the original declaration was found, it was presented to the public in a digital form—a form cheaply and widely accessible to all.
It is relatively obvious that in our newly digital world, the prominence and importance of metadata has increased drastically. Metadata gives you all the basic information you need to know about a source: it’s author, date of publication, and even changes that have been made since the creation of the original. Metadata is like the key to an online “work”. As information—about just about anything—becomes more widely accessible, our system of collecting and recording metadata becomes all the more critical. It is critical not just for recording and tracking historical documents (like that of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence), but also for modern life, business and transactions. In fact, collections of metadata are becoming increasingly critical in company’s marketing efforts.
Do you remember the Forbes article that was published in 2012 about Target, and how they had sent target-ed maternity ads to a teenager…before her family even knew she was pregnant? Well that is a modern example of how metadata has been, and will be used. Target, and many other companies, collect massive amounts of data about their customers. When you shop at Target, you are assigned a customer ID from the moment you walk in the store. That ID is tied to your credit card, name and email address and that becomes “a bucket that stores a history of everything you’ve ever bought and any demographic information Target has collected from you or bought from other sources” (Hill). Although Target and other companies have adjusted their marketing tactics to make their ads a little less obviously targeted, it is virtually impossible to avoid them as a consumer in the digital world.
Target’s targeted ads were some of the first to really break headlines. Now the practice is all over the news, and being able to collect information on consumers is worth millions. Facebook, Snapchat and the like are highly valued companies—because they collect extremely useful information on you, the consumer. They can then turn around and sell that information to companies, who can send you personalized mailers, emails and sidebar notifications of just the things you want (maybe even before you know you want them). Because of all of the metadata that can be collected on consumers and redistributed to corporations, marketing tactics have and will continue to change drastically. And remember, the collection of this kind of data has only really been around for the past 14 years—imagine how marketing will adapt and change in the next decade.
Works Cited:
Hill, Kashmir. “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.” Forbes. 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/>.
Gaffield, Julia. “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World.”The Appendix 2, no. 1 (January 2014).