Metadata: Ariadne's thread or Theseus' courage?

Abstract

The study focuses on the structural characteristics of metadata from a historical perspective, in order to provide a conceptual overview of its essential peculiarities. From this angle, the term is understood as the technological core of the development of previous cataloging and indexing practices. While the methodologies focused on the information retrieval process, especially with a view to the material support of the book, their metadata models originated from the concept of “intransitivity” - the cycles of production, cataloging, indexing and access to information had little flexibility, and were mainly the responsibility of librarians. In the era of the World Wide Web, with the growing volume of content, processes, transfers and transformations, and the many demands that have arisen, the previous processes for generating metadata are proving to be insufficient and incompatible; hence the emergence of metadata based on methodologies that share the concept of “transitivity” - in the access, use and transformation of information data. Like hypertext, understanding the phenomenon from a diachronic point of view can be less conducive to totalizing opinions and more prudent in observing events as a continuous stream of complex socio-economic and historical influences that follow one another in time and space. Depending on their use, metadata in the digital age has been given numerous classifications that tend to distance it from the less specialized public, inhibiting the understanding that relatively simple concepts underlie its tags and algorithms. This reflection seeks to shed light on current metadata structuring practices, emphasizing links with the past, with the aim of contextualizing processes inherent in their development and operationalization.