![]() ![]() ![]() Our Typology of Data Standards (table 1) organizes these standards into categories and provides examples of each. Such metadata is frequently governed by community-developed and community-fostered standards and best practices in order to ensure quality, consistency, and interoperability. ![]() However, cultural heritage information professionals such as museum registrars, library catalogers, and archival processors often apply the term metadata to the value-added information they create to arrange, describe, track, and otherwise enhance access to information objects and the physical items and collections related to those objects. Structure relates to the formal set of associations within or among individual information objects and can be intrinsic, extrinsic, or both.Īll objects carry with them certain metadata that innately results from the circumstances of their creation, management, and use.Context indicates the who, what, why, where, and how aspects associated with the object’s creation and subsequent life and is extrinsic to an information object.Content relates to what the object contains or is about and is intrinsic to an information object.In general, all information objects, regardless of the physical or intellectual form they take, have three features-content, context, and structure-all of which can and should be reflected through metadata: Indeed, in any given instance one can expect to find metadata relevant to any information object existing simultaneously at the item, aggregate, and system levels. The object may be a single item, an aggregate of many items, or an entire database or record-keeping system. 1 In this context, an information object is anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an information system. ![]() Perhaps a more useful, “big picture” way of thinking about metadata is as the sum total of what one can say at a given moment about any information object at any level of aggregation. Thus it has become more important than ever that not only information professionals but also other creators and users of digital content understand the critical roles and potential uses of different types of metadata in ensuring accessible, authoritative, interoperable, scalable, and preservable cultural heritage information and record-keeping systems. Others are using tag clouds and tag graphs to visualize the terminology and structures being used in metadata for selective information resources. Schoolchildren, college students, and adult learners are taught in information literacy programs to look for metadata such as provenance and date information in order to ascertain the authoritativeness of information they retrieve on line. Although metadata is arguably a less familiar term among creators and consumers of networked digital content who are not information professionals per se, those same individuals are increasingly adept at creating, exploiting, and assessing user-contributed metadata such as title, description, and keyword tags for web pages terms from so-called folksonomies and social bookmarks. For more than a century, and particularly since the first developments of national and international descriptive standards, the creation and management of metadata was primarily the responsibility of information professionals engaged in cataloging, classification, and indexing but as more information resources were created or put on line and networked-especially via the web-by the general public, metadata considerations were no longer solely the province of information professionals. Today, we create and interact with it in increasingly digital and overt ways. For these communities, the term referred to a suite of industry or disciplinary standards as well as additional internal and external documentation and other data necessary for the identification, representation, interoperability, technical management, performance, and use of data contained in an information system.Īs a construct, however, metadata has been around for as long as humans have been organizing information, albeit transparently in many cases. Until the mid-1990s, metadata was a term used primarily by communities involved with the management and interoperability of geospatial data and with data management and systems design and maintenance in general. Metadata, literally “data about data,” is today a widely used, yet frequently underspecified term that is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources. ![]()
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