I’ve been involved in the metadata world for a number of years now. I’m not a cataloguer, librarian or indexer, but my role as content manager and content developer has involved providing ways to help users of web services find information. The ability of users to find stuff is integral to the success or failure of a web service or an online business.
As the world moves its services online in all kinds of areas, including education, the capacity to find information easily, to manipulate it and repurpose has become more and more important.
Anyone involved with metadata creation knows that there has been ongoing discussion and debate about its worth and its cost. It can be an expensive business as it involves people, intelligence, time and effort.
With Web 2.0 technologies now finding their feet, and Web 2.0 applications being used widely, metadata is really coming into its own.
Once you have structured metadata there’s all sorts of cool things you can do with it and ways you can manipulate it and new services you can imagine and provide. So the metadata war might be won after all.
However, there’s a second front of debate now firing up - ‘tagging’ by people vs cataloguing by the professional cataloguer.
Tagging is gaining enormous popularity through services like del.icio.us. There’s no doubt that personal tagging is very useful. I feel confident that I can find my stuff once I’ve tagged it - because I tagged it according to my own requirements, interests and focus.
Tagging is really just Dublin Core metadata subject keyword without the use of a controlled vocabulary, with no authority files and with no consistency. I’m now the only authority, and consistency is up to me. It’s handing the subject back to the indvidual.
For personal ‘finding’ this is great. On del.icio.us I can also see who else has tagged an item with the same or similar kind of tag and then raid their resources as well. When you find someone who’s interested in the same kind of thing, and tags in a similar way you have the enormous benefit of finding what they find without having to look for it yourself. It’s quality serendipity - sort of RSVP dating for taggers. 
On the other hand there’s Captain Catalogue who thinks that all resources should described or catalogued using a formal classification system or taxonomy and that tagging is messy, disorganised and inconsistent.
But I think any debate about the relative worth of ‘people tagging’ versus ‘professional cataloguing’ is a distraction from the main game.
What we want to do - in essence - is to help people find stuff from amongst the hundreds of millions of bits of stuff that are available to be found. And, of course, help them find stuff that meets their needs.
My view is that whatever strategy or combination of strategies enables this is the right one for your user community.
‘Whatever works’ may sound glib and way too simple, but in the complex world of information organisation and management finding the solution that works can be anything but simple.
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