An analysis of embedded Metadata usage on the World Wide Web
Paulina E. Vinyard · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2019
This study examined the use of HTML meta tags for embedding metadata in World Wide Web resources. While many metadata initiatives that organize and facilitate resource discovery have been successful in organizational and corporate environments, little work has been done to determine whether or not Web resource creators are using metadata. This study examined the HTML source code for 299 web pages to provide a snapshot of how embedded metadata is being used on the Web and used a survey to explore the reasons why resource creators do or do not use metadata. The results found that 71% of the pages examined contained metadata, but very little of it conformed to any metadata standard. The survey results indicated that the majority of respondents did not grasp the larger context of metadata outside of its use on the web, and that they were unfamiliar with the concept of a metadata standard. These findings suggest that to improve the amount and quality of metadata used in web pages, resource creators should be given a context larger than the web in order to understand its value. Additionally, search engines need to get involved by providing metadata field-searching capabilities.