I ran across this summary of a meeting on “What metadata is really useful?” hosted by JISC CETIS. While structured (administrative) metadata is less useful to me now than it was when I was working on IEEE LOM, the concept of data about the use of resources like MIT OpenCourseWare is of interest to me.

Phil Baker summarizes the meeting outcomes as:

Here’s a sampler of the ideas turned up during the day:
* continue to build the resources with background information that I gathered for the meeting.
* promote the use common survey tools, for example the online tool used by David Davies for the MeDeV subject centre (results here).
* textual analysis of metadata records to show what is being described in what terms.
* sharing search log in a common format so that they can be analysed by others (echoes here of Dave Pattern’s sharing of library usage data and subsequent work on business intelligence that can be extracted from it).
* analysis of search logs to show which queries yield zero hits which would identify topics on which there was unmet demand.

Phil has another post on “Analysing OCWSEarch logs” that is also interesting.