On metadata – Daniel Lemire's blog

I remember a time, before the Web, when you would look for relevant academic papers by reading large books with tiny fonts that would list all relevant work in a given area published in a given year. Of course, you could have just gone to the shelves and checked the research articles themselves but, by for a slow human being, this would have been just too time consuming. These large volumes contained nothing by "metadata": lists of article titles, authors, keywords… They were tremendously valuable to the researchers. One of the earliest applications of computers was to help manage document collections. In this sense, the Web and Google are very naturally applications for computers.