Cynthia Murrell writes of the concern of some groups who want permanent metadata on digital objects:
On the other hand, there’s the law of unintended consequences. There is also the question of “language drift.” If metadata are not up to date, the searcher of the future might not be able to locate the information object because the search term does not match the metadata’s lingo.
And raises the more pragmatic concern of what happens when metadata needs to be corrected?
Curious, do institutions return to digital objects to update them to have the latest metadata?
My impression is that they don’t, but that is based on my experiences with mostly libraries and card catalog data.
Suggestions? Comments for where to look?
A topic map would enable the preservation of the original metadata and updates to that metadata.
Anyone know of digital preservation efforts that plan on preservation of metadata and its updating?