Metadata Collection Strategies by Maish Nichani and Patrick Lambe.
From the post:
Metadata can be collected in many ways—from the information environment, work activities and from people. The problem arises when metadata that could be effectively collected from the environment is delegated to be collected from people. People who are in the middle of work tasks do not see direct benefits from completing numerous metadata fields. When coerced into doing unnatural things, they usually revolt or find workarounds thereby undermining the entire initiative.
In this article we share strategies to collect metadata that lower the reliance on people in supplying metadata. We cannot completely remove people from the equation but we can prevent them from doing additional work, and focus the role of people on the value added metadata that machines and environment cannot automatically supply.
Maish and Patrick suggest several places where metadata can be collected without asking users.
I would go a step further and create a topic template for collecting metadata.
For a blog, having collected the author and other information once, there really isn’t a reason to collect it for every post that appears.
The same would be true for journals, where a topic template could assist with creating domains for vocabulary usage.
For example, when searching for a genome, limiting a search to genomic research archives, avoids part numbers and other overloading of a genome identifier.
Our machines don’t have to solve searching problems without human assistance. Particularly when a small assist can pay such high dividends in search results.