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 <[log in to unmask]>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
>