> 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