Programme

Abstract

The spread and proliferation of metadata threatens to overwhelm the informational content that metadata was originally invented to supplement. The emergence of new kinds of metadata and markup are traced, and reasons for their spread are explored. The concept of metadata needs to be disaggregated and refined so that we can understand more precisely how documents are produced and managed now that information increasingly takes digital and hypertextual forms. In this reworking of the idea and purpose of metadata, more attention needs to be paid to document creation and composition, and to where authority lies over these processes.