HackRead: Hackers can spoof commit metadata to create false GitHub repositories. “Checkmarx security researchers have warned about an emerging new supply chain attack tactic involving spoofed metadata commits to present malicious GitHub repositories as legit.”
How-To Geek: How to See EXIF Metadata in Photos on iPhone. “Every photo you take on your iPhone includes EXIF metadata, which records information about how, when, and where you took the photo. Previously, you needed a special utility to see EXIF metadata on iPhone, but with iOS 15 and up, you can see it directly in the Photos app. Here’s how.”
University of Rochester: Digital justice through data dictionaries. “Historically, collections have been described in ways that reflect not only academic priorities and academic privilege, but also the frequently white, heterosexual perspective of the academy. So, the chosen terminology may also not reflect what is important to particular communities about content they may have created or resources that address their experiences. For members of the Black or LGBTQAI+ communities, this practice could make some resources virtually undiscoverable. The River Campus Libraries (RCL) is participating in a new University of Rochester project that seeks to bring long-overdue change to this realm.”
Search Engine Land: Vimeo adds structured data to all public videos to improve Google Search visibility. “Vimeo, a popular video hosting platform (obviously not as popular as YouTube), has added structured data to all of its publicly available videos on its platform. Vimeo said the SEO changes they made to the videos will give ‘your videos the best opportunity to appear for relevant searches.’”
Coda Story: How to document war crimes in the digital age. “OSINT has been crucial for documenting atrocities in Syria and Yemen, but it has its limitations. In many cases, the person who shot a video either can’t be identified or can’t be found, so they can’t be called to testify in court. When videos are uploaded to social media, crucial metadata that often accompanies video files — like the time and precise geographical location where a video was shot — are either obfuscated or can’t be trusted, making those videos harder to authenticate. Anything that makes OSINT evidence easier to dispute can allow Russia to manipulate narratives in its favor.”
Northeastern University: Panel: “Digital Archives, Anti-Racism, and Critical Metadata Practices”. “Please join us for a virtual panel hosted at Northeastern University on April 14, 12–2pm (Eastern), on the topic of antiracist metadata practices. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required, RSVP here. This two-hour virtual event brings together four leading scholars and archivists for a conversation on anti-racist metadata practices in digital archives.”
Search Engine Journal: YouTube Rolls Out New Metadata For Educational Videos. “This update was announced during YouTube’s weekly news roundup that includes a number of smaller changes for creators that are worth knowing about. Here’s a recap of the latest news for YouTube creators, starting with the metadata update.”
Yale News: Travel log: A new digital afterlife for museum exhibitions. “The Yale University Library, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), and Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) have partnered with Edinburgh University, Oxford University’s E-Research Center, and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in compiling a digital project that will use advanced computational techniques — such as text mining and machine learning — to capture all sorts of exhibition data and allow museums to make it easily accessible and shareable to scholars and the public.”
DC Public Library: Washington Blade Describe-A-Thon. “Celebrate LGBTQ+ history by helping The People’s Archive add more issues of the Washington Blade to our digital collection Dig DC. Learn to create descriptions, called metadata, at this hands-on virtual event. No prior knowledge of metadata or the Washington Blade is required to participate. All skills levels are welcome. This event will be completely virtual.”
Internet Archive Blog: Internet Archive Releases Refcat, the IA Scholar Index of over 1.3 Billion Scholarly Citations. “As part of our ongoing efforts to archive and provide perpetual access to at-risk, open-access scholarship, we have released Refcat (‘reference’ + ‘catalog’), the citation index culled from the catalog that underpins our IA Scholar service for discovering the scholarly literature and research outputs within Internet Archive. This first release of the Refcat dataset contains over 1.3 billion citations extracted from over 60 million metadata records and over 120 million scholarly artifacts (articles, books, datasets, proceedings, code, etc) that IA Scholar has archived through web harvesting, digitization, integrations with other open knowledge services, and through partnerships and joint initiatives.”
FYI Music News: Metadata: A Solution Without A Universal Protocol. “Secure digital audio transfer platform Byta recently commissioned music journalist Shawn Reynaldo to write a three-part series that looks into the state of music sharing, when it comes to working with audio files: music metadata, music storage, music sharing. What follows is part one dealing with embedding the compete metadata that assigns rights and ownership in tracks so that compensation to creators and rights owners can be correctly assigned. As it stands today, there is no standard for metadata and because of inconsistencies it is estimated that billions of dollars remain on the table as assignment of payments has proved elusive.” A nice deep dive that will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to work with missing/incomplete metadata.
Library of Congress: Library of Congress Releases Data for Free Download and Discovery. “The Library of Congress announced today its third release of records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections. This MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) release surpasses previous releases and adds more than 200,000 new records to the existing 25 million record database.”
Commonplace: The Invisible Citation Commons. “Scholarly knowledge relies on citations. Discovering and acknowledging prior work is fundamental to knowing what has been done before, synthesizing the state of the field, and identifying spaces for new research. Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge.”
Michigan State University: File not found: Biodiversity needs better data archiving. “Missing metadata — data that provides information about other data — might not sound like a big deal, but it’s a costly problem that’s hindering humanity’s plans to protect the planet’s biodiversity. ‘The way I see it, it’s pretty simple,’ said Rachel Toczydlowski, a postdoctoral researcher in Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science. ‘If we want to monitor and conserve global genetic diversity — the most fundamental level of biodiversity — we need to improve our data archiving practices ASAP.’”
Search Engine Land: Google adds author URL property to uniquely identify authors of articles. “Google updated the article structured data help document to add new author properties to the list of recommended properties you can use in Google Search. The company said it added a new recommended author.url property to the article structured data documentation.”
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