Throughout my career I’ve spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to clean up messy, inconsistent data sets — typically descriptive metadata about digital collections. In the past, this has usually involved complex sequences of Edit/Replace operations in a text editor, and lots of cool Microsoft Excel functions or Microsoft Access queries — … Read more
Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO” for short), the tweaking of web content so that it ranks highly in search engine results, can often seem like either a dark art or snake oil. If you manage a website, you will almost certainly have received emails from various shadowy “SEO Experts,” promising to make your website show … Read more
I’ve been a fan of the ISO 8601 date format ever since I first learned about it at a Dublin Core Metadata Initiative conference in the late nineties: It’s: Logical (the elements are ordered from the most significant to the least from left to right); Y2K-proof, since it uses a 4-digit year (remember this was … Read more