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September 22, 2005

Metadata Dashboard

I have enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books to my son, who is now six years old. In truth, I think I get more enjoyment out of them than he does. Twenty five years ago, my childhood was consumed at night reading the Three Investigators”. The three investigators were three young boys (Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews) that got involved in many mystery adventures. The adventures of the Three Investigators were unique in that they had a real-life mentor with a national and international reputation already. Alfred Hitchcock was widely known for suspense and storytelling in his movies and other books; so a built-in audience of fans was just waiting for something else to read. One added bonus of having Hitchcock as a mentor was that it gave a good opportunity for the authors to tie up loose ends at the end of each story in a way that did not seem too out of place. In many mystery stories, the resolution at the end of the story can be awkward because all the clues have to be explained, and their relevance to the solution has to be justified. It can be quite a challenge. By giving the boys an opportunity to talk to Hitchcock, Robert Arthur (Author) set up an excellent vehicle to end each story with all the information we readers needed to understand how things were pieced together. What really got me was that every 30-50 pages they included a visual image of the action, which provided a foundation for the story and allowed us logical thinkers to see the scene.

In the world of metadata, we must also provide this form of visual support of the impact that the repository collection is having on the community at large. This impact or value has been one of the most difficult items to accomplish. The reason is that we have an implementation team that tends to focus on the qualitative value measures and not stay away from the quantitative. However, like the Three Investigator book series, a combination is really required. A metadata dashboard can provide the name of the repository, description, content type, owner, contact information, date, and a status of the growth and trends. The content metrics can describe what assets are loaded, additions, updates, and percentage change. Usage has a very similar meta-model. The key is to get these high level metrics on a single slide which can be presented to management on a regular basis.

Posted by Todd at September 22, 2005 1:38 AM