Which method can be used to harvest documents for metadata analysis?

• A. Use a web spider tool against the target website to pull potentially interesting documents
• B. Manually copy all documents
• C. Destroy the data
• D. Purchase proprietary databases

Answer: (A)

Automated crawling is the practical way to gather documents for metadata analysis. A web crawler systematically traverses a site, following links and downloading documents such as PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets. This approach quickly builds a large, representative set of files, making it possible to extract and analyze metadata (like author, dates, and file properties) across many documents. It’s far more scalable and comprehensive than manually copying items, which is slow and easy to miss files. Other methods either don’t target the site’s documents or aren’t scalable, and they aren’t aimed at building a usable corpus for metadata extraction. Remember to perform any crawling with proper authorization and within legal/ethical bounds.