Investigations of a Dog

Exciting news via Read Write Web: Yahoo announced last week that their search engine will start searching semantic markup. Initially they’re concentrating on Microformats but eventually they will be supporting lots of other metadata standards using RDF. This opens up a lot of possibilities for finding information and making information easier to find. Although Yahoo Pipes previously offered powerful tools for doing things with structured content, one of the drawbacks seemed to be that you had to already know where to find the content you wanted to do stuff with. Once Yahoo search results take metadata into account it will save an awful lot of work.

For historians, learning new search techniques to take advantage of this development will be vital, but that’s the easy (or at least less difficult) part. There is even more work to be done on the side of creating metadata: putting adequate metadata into the digital resources we create ourselves, encouraging organisations to provide metadata in their digital collections (that means you, CWGC!), and above all helping to define standards for historical information so that the metadata is as useful as possible. This is exactly what Tom Scheinfeldt was getting at in his recent post at Found History. Although I took issue with some of the things he said about ideology, his central points were spot on: history hasn’t always been done the same way and won’t always be done the same way; digital technology is changing things right now; organizing, cataloguing, and collaboration will become more important than lone researchers working on monographs.