I've been working with embedded metadata for some years and there are great tools out there for embedding, extracting and reusing metadata (technical, administrative, and descriptive).  The tools allow for batch data entry, use metadata schema or standards.  As a digital archivist whose job is to take in lots of this digitized content that generally has no context or that context is lost or misplaced, I wholly advocate for embedding metadata.  There are consumer products that can then expose this metadata so that it doesn't have to be retyped again and again.

What gets my goat is when I hear folks belabor the effort but don't talk about the rewards and opportunities that embedding metadata can bring.  Forthcoming use cases from The Royal Library in Denmark about mass digitization and embedding metadata as well as using the Exif / IPTC Extension for describing the content in image files.  There's also work being done with video and audio and CAD files.  

Check out these resources on Embedded Metadata from the VRA Embedded Metadata Working Group (Greg Reser, Chair):
About Embedded Metadata:  http://metadatadeluxe.pbworks.com/w/page/62407805/Concepts
http://metadatadeluxe.pbworks.com/w/page/20792256/Other%20Organizations
Case Studies:  http://metadatadeluxe.pbworks.com/w/page/62407826/Communities

Okay, I'll step off my soap box now...
Kari

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kyle Banerjee
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2013 12:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Looking for two coders to help with discoverability of videos

> 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