Reuse - the beauty of embedded metadata

My Digital Asset Library (DAL) plans for this year included improving our capacity to manage working files and making better use of embedded metadata. These two goals came together as several staff in Information Production and City Planning participated in a working files pilot. Their feedback made clear we need to make it easier to upload, describe and reuse files. Both Information Production and City Planning, Graphics & Visualization have similar business processes, creating new design projects using Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, linked to the raw graphic & image files, and often reusing existing content.

Pilot participants noted that applying detailed metadata to the many distinct files that make up a single design product could be very time consuming. This process is quite different from uploading a batch of event photos, which all have the same metadata. We decided to re-examine how we can simplify the process of uploading and tagging files.

As a first step, we focused on making it easier to reuse files and metadata. If an event photo or graphic has already been described in DAL, we wanted that information to stay with the file once downloaded.  It became clear we needed to develop an embedded metadata standard. Using Adobe's XMP technology, embedded metadata allows descriptive information (such as creator or keywords) to be written directly in the file and be read and written by different compatible applications. The first implementation of the standard will automatically apply metadata to files on download from DAL. This will save time since the files will not need to be described again if they are modified, reused and/or uploaded.


 Over the summer I've worked with representatives from each business unit to develop our embedded metadata standard. I'm pretty happy we were able to identify a core set that everyone could agree on. Taking the time to debate the implications of choosing particular standards and mappings was very useful to gain consensus. Throughout the process I emphasized that this standard was our first version and not set in stone. It will change as we gain more experience and our requirements evolve. I think acknowledging the provisional nature of this particular set of metadata properties was very helpful.

We were able to build on existing mappings used to embed metadata in Archives' photos prior to upload into DAL. Looking outside the City, the Smithsonian Institution provided excellent perpective and advice with their Basic Guidelines for Minimal Descriptive Embedded Metadata in Digital Images.

We've identified 16 fields that can be embedded. Not all fields are used by all participating groups. Some are interoperable with the Dublin Core Metadata Standard, the City of Toronto Descriptive Standard and IPTC (the default fields used in Adobe CS products), while some are DAL custom fields.

We are now working to secure funding for professional services to implement our standard in DAL. Working closely with the business representatives, I have a much better understanding of their needs. Using this standard for embedding metadata in downloaded files is really a first step towards an improved model for managing working files. We will continue to plan further improvements to our metadata creation and uploading model to drive adoption, file reuse and effective search.