The Next Quest: Metadata

'Metadata' is a scary word. I kind of know what it means (and can trot out the standard 'data about data' definition) but I don't properly understand it. So when I spotted that Coursera were offering a MOOC on Metadata I signed up.

Week 1 began yesterday and I am very surprised to say that it's great! Informative and enjoyable and the instructor (Jeffrey Pomerantz of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has a great presenting style - so much so that I watched all the video lectures instead of shouting out random answers to University Challenge.

Knowledge of HTML is a prerequisite for the course but I'm glossing over that slightly - I can learn as I go along, right? And I was pleased to find that I scored well over 60% on the W3Schools’ HTML Quiz which is mostly down to tampering with the plain text view in LibGuides at work to see how things work (and possibly lucky guessing on a few questions).

If I get time I will take the free W3Schools’ HTML tutorial in parallel with the metadata MOOC. If not, I'll let you know how I get on!


(Image from Mel McC's Flickr photostream under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)