Metadata and…Legos?

Our family is a Lego family.

As is evidenced above we have an organization system in place for easy (or at least easier) piece finding and well we have a lot of legos! The collection began many years ago when my husband was a little boy and has only continued and grown. We have spent many carefree, cold, weekends building legos as a family. Whereas my daughter and I prefer working off of plans and actual “sets,” my husband and sons always go the creative route building their own pieces that, at least in my son’s case, have a lot of guns. That being said the beauty of legos is regardless of if they are 30 years old or newly bought as a Christmas gift the pieces all work together!

Now, my husband being the organizer that he naturally is, decided over Christmas break that he needed to create a system to keep track of our lego sets with instructions to make them…wait for it…easy to retrieve and discover. This, my friends, is metadata language;-) So he created a metadata document tracking the set’s number, a description of the set, and even a link to the online plans for the set (in case our paper plans get destroyed, a very real possibility with three kids and a dog). He had some other items as well but that is the gist of it. After beginning this class and really delving into the metadata topic, I told him that he was a metadata creator and he should be proud. Also, the system works so I would call that “good” metadata.

Metadata: What You Can’t See Can Hurt You!

This title is the title of a Digital Detectives podcast I recently listened to (You can find it at Legal Talk Network on iTunes, if you’re interested). The talk focused on what metadata means for the legal profession and was quite enlightening. After listening to the podcast I stumbled upon this article. In it the author states, “I can tell you everything a lawyer needs to know about metadata in seven words: Buy a metadata scrubber and use it.”

His words echo the conclusion from the podcast. While it is a bit of a “duh” moment, of course metadata and its automatic creation would be a concern for the legal profession, I had not really thought about it at all. Why would I? I have no ties to the legal field whatsoever.  Along those lines, I wonder what other professions metadata creation is a foremost concern: medical, educational…? I suppose any field where privacy is a main concern, which seems to be everything today.

So what was the answer in the podcast? Metadacte! According to their website it is “a patented server-based metadata cleaning solution that includes mechanisms for central policy management and a unified platform for mail gateway including webmail and smart phone attachments. Metadacte will analyze and clean your documents before you send them outside of your firm, from any device that is connected to the network, providing the confidence you need for your metadata management.”

I wonder when we will all have this type of software on our home/personal computing devices? It might be necessary sooner than later…

Metadata – It Will Find You Out!

Recently, while listening to a podcast on metadata (I’ll share more about that later), I heard about this story. I just had to laugh! Metadata naturally attaches to files and documents, and it will find you out if you don’t scrub it out.

Many of my classmates have already mentioned and/or written about the metadata we create with our social networking lives, but we also unwittingly create and share metadata every time we create word documents, power points, excel spreadsheets and the like. This is a fact I had not considered, but probably should…

Curious if anyone can speak to dealing with this issue at work?