Wendy Duff
Professor
University of Toronto
The Wonderful World of Metadata

Bio

Wendy Duff is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. While doing her doctoral work she was the project coordinator for the University of Pittsburgh Electronic Recordkeeping Project. Her primary research interests are metadata, user studies, archival description, and electronic records. She is the chair of the Canadian Committee on Archival Description, and a member of the Encoded Archival Description Working Group. She has written numerous articles on various aspects of archival description, electronic records and access to archival material. She was co-investigator for a digitization and access project, Usage analysis funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and has recently completed a study to email reference questions to determine the information archival users seek and the metadata they use when searching for it. She is presently studying how scholars and genealogists use archival descriptive tools.

Presentation Abstract

This session will provide an basic introduction to the value of metadata, the major metadata initiatives and projects as well as an overview of implementation issues.