Author: Rafael Repiso – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
The digitalization of the information carries more complexity than the simple transference of data among the paper and the screen. As a result of this complexity there emerge the metadata, descriptive labels, continuing with the catalographic tradition, whose object is the normalized description of the documents with the object that they register easily and become easily integrated into big sets of data and however, retrievable according to its characteristics, both formal and of content.
What does it mean? Well, something simple, that the electronic documents of relevance, as the scientific articles, should have assigned labels that describe them, title labels, names of the authors, theme or the media in which are published, among others. Nowadays there exist different technologies that make it possible the descriptive mark of electronic documents, outstanding for its greater use the XML format (more generic), the model of data RDF or the concrete model of metadata Dublin Core (database model based on XML and RDF).
In the context of metadata of the scientific articles, the good journals introduce the metalabels in the moment of creation of the works, layout of the pdf or other formats. This allows to the databases as Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar, identify the documents unambiguously and register and describe them properly. In the same way, the meta-labels allow the bibliographic management references as Mendeley, Zotero or RefWorks to import data from the documents that are kept in them automatically without the need of describing the documents, this given the case that the meta-labels are correct and complete.
Therefore, in the context of the digital documentation, the development of the meta-labels is essential for the later diffusion and visibility of the documents. A work without meta-labels or with wrong meta-labels will be as a book hidden in a library, which does not appear in the catalogue or appears in a wrong way, an invisible document.
