Monday, February 07, 2005

Cadavers: A New Use for Metadata?

Maybe it's just because I'm so tired at the moment, but the story that broke this weekend about using barcodes or RFID to track cadavers at the University of California really interested me. The school was involved in a big scandal a while back about the disposition of corpses that had been donated for medical research. Hence, they want to be able to track the cadavers more efficiently.

Maybe they just need better metadata. I've known catalogers who could describe an object in a way that would make an FBI agent envious. A fully complete MARC record for each body could go a long way to helping them with collection analysis and control. And talk about the ultimate authority file...

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