News - First-round metadata collection nearly

First-round metadata collection nearly complete

August 2002

Work on the first round of metadata collection and review is nearly complete. The focus has been on describing the services of core central government agencies that are most used by people, like applying for child support or getting a passport.

In all about 90 agencies are taking part currently and the tally of services now stands at 1100. This includes a set of services common to all local councils, like renewing a dog licence.

Some agencies have also begun to catalogue the resources, like forms and brochures, that support these services. Over 1800 resources have been described so far. These include PDF versions of brochures like the Accident Compensation Corporation’s leaflet advising on the safe use of farm bikes.

Agencies have been working to a tight timeframe to complete this round. The E-government Unit’s Metalogue Helpline has supported them in their efforts, providing technical and editorial advice to fine-tune the service descriptions. Agencies have been calling on the talents of their cataloguers, communications people, policy teams and frontline staff to produce metadata that succinctly describes their services in a way that can be understood easily by most people.

The next metadata collection round will involve more agencies and further description of resources that people can access both online and offline.