I would have to agree with this where the data exists. The data captured by digital cameras these days can be incredibly extensive and thorough. Given this, I recently started exposing this data for all of the 8,000 photos I now have on my photos web site http://FreeLargePhotos.com/ . There is now a link on the page for an individual photo that a user can click on that will pull out the data dynamically from the image file and display it in plain text. Here is a random example:
<http://freelargephotos.com/photos/003171/exif.txt> The tricky bit is of course where the photo is actually scanned from a slide, which of course plays havoc with items such as the creation date. So depending on the exact situation your mileage may vary, but the basic principle stands -- if you can allow a machine to capture the metadata then by all means let it. Roy On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Kyle Banerjee <kyle.baner...@gmail.com>wrote: > > Is it out of the question to extract technical metadata from the > > audiovisual materials themselves (via MediaInfo et al)? > > > One of the things that absolutely blows my mind is the widespread practice > of hand typing this stuff into records. Aside from an obvious opportunity > to introduce errors/inconsistencies, many libraries record details for the > archival versions rather than the access versions actually provided. So > patrons see a description for what they're not getting... > > Just for the heck of it, sometime last year I scanned thousands of objects > and their descriptions to see how close they were. Like an idiot, I didn't > write up what I learned because I was just trying to satisfy my own > curiosity. However, the takeaway I got from the exercise was that the > embedded info is so much better than the hand keyed stuff that you'd be > nuts to consider the latter as authoritative. Curiously, I did find cases > where the embedded info was clearly incorrect. I can only guess that was > manually edited. > > kyle >