4 comments

  1. maritza says:

    Thank you. What a fantastic way of explaining things! Clear, but thorough, organized, with very illustrative images. And funny, on top of that. I, who have been struggling with metadata for some time now, and still find there’s something I can’t seem to grasp, appreciate the way you make this complex matter seem simple.

  2. Janet says:

    We use metadata templates for the various newspapers we work on, one for each newspaper. The editors have now changed the author format to NAME, Contributed. Unfortunately every time I import this template it changes the comma to a semicolon. Any idea how to stop this from happening?

    • Carl Seibert says:

      Hi,

      First off, for the benefit of those following along, in the newspaper business “Contributed” or “Courtesy” are common Credit strings on handout photos – photos that are given to the newspaper, usually by individuals or businesses. Like so: “Jane Doe/Courtesy”, where “Jane Doe” is the Creator field and “Courtesy” is the Credit field, separated with a piece of punctuation. Slashes, commas, colons, pipes, and dashes are all often used.

      Janet – in your case, we would need more information to hazard a guess about where the issue lies. In what software is this happening? What strings are coming from embedded metadata and what metadata is being generated on the fly? What are editors doing when the bad thing happens?

      I took a look at wsicnews.com and didn’t see any see malformed bylines. But then again, I may not have been looking in the right places.

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