Labelling and metadata on the hodge-podge of recordings on your home computer

[Greg Dickson]

Hello,

I'm trying to tidy up my files on my home laptop, which I've only  
ever used secondarily to whatever computer I was assigned by various  
workplaces.  Over about four years, I've ended up with a real hodge- 
podge of recordings and files in all kinds of languages made in all  
kinds of situations by all kinds of people even! (When you lend out  
your Zoom recorder it can come back with interesting things on it!).   
I thought it's time for a spring clean.

I'm pretty decided on a way to label my files consistently, but would  
appreciate any feedback or shared experiences.

I thought I'd go with something like:

100405MARfrNGUgd01

Which is DATE (April 5, 2010) LANGUAGE (Marra) speaker (initials: fr)  
LOCATION (Ngukurr) "recorded by" (gd = me) Series number (1st in the  
series)

And then any ELAN, metadata, video or text files will have the same  
name, just a different file extension.

I'm wondering though, what should I do about metadata?  What do  
others do?  How necessary is keeping metadata for such a  
miscellaneous collection of files?  And how do I do it?  One place I  
worked at just kept a store of .txt files of metadata - 1 file for  
each recording.  Is that a good way?

Any help or info appreciated.

Guda mingi,
(That's all now)

Greg Dickson

PO Box 2468
Katherine NT 0852
Ph: 8971 0207 / 0427 391 153
Email: munanga at bigpond.com




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