Setting the Stage

Metadata, literally " data about data, " has become a widely used yet still 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. It is a construct that has been around for as long as humans have been organizing information, albeit transparently in many cases, and today we create and interact with it in increasingly digital ways. For the past hundred years at least, the creation and management of metadata has primarily been the responsibility of information professionals engaged in cataloging, classification, and indexing; but as information resources are increasingly put online by the general public, metadata considerations are no longer solely the province of information professionals. Although metadata is arguably a much less familiar term among creators and consumers of networked digital content who are not information professionals per se, these same individuals are increasingly adept at creating, exploiting, and assessing user-contributed metadata such as Web page title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks. Schoolchildren and college students are taught in information literacy programs to look for metadata such as provenance and date information in order to ascertain the authoritativeness of information that they retrieve on the Web. 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 of different types of metadata in ensuring accessible, authoritative, interoperable, scaleable, and preservable cultural heritage information and record-keeping systems. 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. For these communities, metadata 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. Perhaps a more useful, " big picture " way of thinking about metadata is as the sum total of what one can say about any information object at any level of aggregation.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. The object may comprise a single item, it may be an aggregate of many items, or it may be the …