Addressing the Metadata Gap: Ad Hoc Digital Documents in Organizations

Abstract

Digital documents are crucial for day-to-day organizational work, but as yet their management is personalized, erratic, unsystematic; both the research on text databases and the practice of document management can benefit from an improved understanding of this complex context and the roles of metadata in it. We will review empirical studies of document work in organizations and consider both traditional and emerging roles for metadata in ad hoc document work settings. After identifying these roles, we will analyze a metadata standard implemented in HTML (the Dublin Core) for its suitability for supporting metadata use in this context. Directions for practice and research are offered prior to the concluding remarks.