A question of drill-down

[Note: Back from leave]

I am going to have a meeting today with some library staff members about the issues of meta-data. One interesting point I will raise will be about whether meta-data is relevant for the purposes of this project. This may be an odd thing to say - but in terms of what the project is trying to do - it is worth noting that we are trying to 'record' the value of documents and not just catalogue them. This means that the data will be largely 'unknown' and 'fuzzy' - as it will be case-specific. Therefore, designing or using a strict metadata schema could prove difficult. However, we could still use some basic elements of the meta-data schema to record key document attributes - with half a mind to record 'flexible' data in more string/text-based elements (such as 'description'. I already alluded to this an as approach in my previous entry - through using tags (from slowly built up tag library) that you can use - delimited by a semicolon.

I will see what the library staff think about this.

In terms of drill-down - you could search for key metadata fields first and then through the use of tags use search query strings (text) such as contain "x" AND "x" NOT "x" - to find specific documents. Again - as stated in the previous post - simpler but not an elegant solution,