Help others find what is in the audio – Metadata

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In this Episode 17 of Create Your Life Story we look at the extra content to include within the files and posts that will lead others to discover your Life Story.

A life story is full of content about a life experienced during a particular time in the history of a culture. Here in this life story we have the first hand account, in someone’s own voice, of what they experienced during particular events. For an easy understanding think of any cultural significant event, then wonder what it would be like to hear stories of being in that era to experience it.  What about the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing, World War 2, Death of Princess Diana or something larger like the Cold War.  Many of us have these memories but future generations won’t, like we don’t know of the Victorian Era, WW1 or the assassination of Lincoln.

Why are we creating a Life Story?  Why are we going to all this trouble?  Will anyone care?

All good questions and I’m sure there are many answers to them, most will be primarily concerned with family and friends within a few degrees of influence to the person who’s story we are recording.  They are the ones who know the person, they are the people who personally care because of an intimate relationship of some sort. Parent, Grandparent, Grandchild, Child or even a very close friend. All people who know them personally through a varying emotional relationship.

Many events that family members will find fascinating will be of little concern for others but in amongst the general information will be stories that historians and sociologists will find rich pickings for understanding a culture and first hand accounts of historical events.

In preparing your Life Story for it’s place in the great archive that is the Internet, it’s worth taking some time to consider what content you wish to associate with the audio.  Additional to enhancing the audio for the interest of family and friends, there are several places where this content can be included to enable others to not only find but also augment the already available audio Life Story.

* Episode titles

* MP3 Metadata. Including tags, descriptions, comments, lyrics and album art.

* Blog post text particularly title, links, categories and tags

* Images, videos and slide shows all described and tagged

* Blog post audio timeline with descriptions

* Archive.org page text, description, tags and images

In all of these locations text can be added to help researches find interesting content on a subject that is relevant. Also by linking  between different storage locations such as audio (Archive.org), image (Flickr, Panorama), video (YouTube, Vimeo) and your WordPress.com site you can increase the connectivity and chances of being discovered.

It’s worth taking the time to include as much content as reasonable, in all these places so as to create the best chance for a researcher to discover, then locate the information they are after in the audio. This is not only for researches but also for family members who want to locate that bit of audio about…Whatever it is.

One great method to assist with this is to create a timeline of the chapter.  Once the audio is completed, scan through it writing short descriptive notes with the relevant time within the audio.  This list when posted will enable others to firstly search and find the relevant subject, then to locate within the audio where that section is, rather than listening to the entirety of the audio.

If the time is taken to describe and create the “behind the scenes” metadata and text of all the media,