"Although fully searchable text can, in theory, be retrieved without much metadata in the future, it is difficult to imagine how a complex digital or multimedia object is stored in an archive of any kind might never survive, let alone be discovered and used, if it were not accompanied by good metadata" (Abby Smith). Discuss Smith's statement in the context of the contemporary information environment IntroductionIn the world of preservation and librarianship the common focus is on the preservation of content, ensuring its longevity, discoverability, and a stable and consistent technological and metadata solution. However we live in an age where everyone is a publisher of some kind, and more consistently the content they produce will be in digital rather than analogue form. Within that content there will always be varying amounts of metadata, some will be populated with immense detail and granularity, other content will have been created without any human intervention to add additional information to it. Indeed, much of the digital material produced will have been created by people who have no concept of metadata and no desire to know about it or have time to use it. The issue raised by Smith's statement highlights many of the issues surrounding data preservation and digital content, with metadata representing only a portion of those issues, but an integral part of the ongoing management of the massive influx of digital content produced. Metadata Issues Let's start with a potentially scary piece of IT market research. “In 2010 the amount of digital information created and replicated worldwide was nearly 1,203 exabytes, (one exabyte is one billion gigabytes or 1018 bytes)” IDC [1]With the amount of data growing exponentially year after year you might ask, ...... half of the paper ......9. http://annotator.imense.com/info/ accessed 12-12-201010. http://www.virage.com/rich-media/index.htm accessed 12-12-201011. Council, Technology Strategy, Metadata Production Tools MAINSTREAM COLLABORATIVE FUNDING FOR R&D Metadata Production Tools 2011 http://www.innovateuk.org/_assets/pdf/competition-documents/metadataproductiontoolscompetition.pdf accessed 02-01-201112. Bulterman, DCa, “Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?” IEEE Multimedia 11, no. 4 (October 2004): 10-17 (Bulterman, 2004)13. Shah, Chirag. “ContextMiner: Supporting contextual information extraction for ephemeral digital video preservation.” International Journal of Digital Curation 4, no. 1 (2009): 175-192. http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/111.14. http://tagger.steve.museum/ accessed 12/21/201015. http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ accessed 21/12/2010.