Such bibliographic metadata has been systematically and cooperatively created and shared since the s and made available to repositories and users through automated systems such as bibliographic utilities, online public access catalogs OPACs , and commercially available databases. Today this type of metadata is created not only by humans but also in a variety of automated ways such as metadata mining, metadata harvesting, and web crawling.
Automation of metadata will inevitably continue to expand with the evolution and increased implementation of the Resource Description Framework RDF , linked open data, and the Semantic Web, which are discussed later in this book. A large component of archival and museum metadata creation activities has traditionally been focused on context. Elucidating and preserving context is what assists with identifying and preserving the evidential value of records and artifacts in and over time; it is what facilitates the authentication of those objects, and it is what assists researchers with their analysis and interpretation.
Archival and manuscript metadata includes the products of value-added archival description such as finding aids, catalog records, and indexes. However, it also includes descriptive documentation generated in the course of creating, managing, preserving, using, and reusing both born-digital and digitized archival materials. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard METS , developed by the Digital Library Federation and maintained by the Library of Congress, is often used for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata and digital surrogates at the item level for objects such as digitized photographs, maps, and correspondence from the collections described by finding aids and other collection or group-level metadata records.
Many repositories make standardized descriptive metadata for library and archival collections available on line through resources such as WorldCat, the Digital Public Library of America, and ArchiveGrid. Consensus and collaboration were slower to build in the museum community, where the benefits of standardization of description, such as shared cataloging and exchange of descriptive data, were less readily apparent until relatively recently.
Although it would seem to be a desirable goal to integrate materials of different types that are related by provenance or subject but distributed across the repositories of museums, archives, and libraries, initiatives such as Museums and the Online Archive of California MOAC have met with limited success.
Selection of the most appropriate suite of metadata standards and tools—and creation of clean, consistent metadata according to those standards—will not only enable good descriptions of specific collection materials, but will also make it possible to map metadata created according to different community-specific standards, thus furthering the goal of interoperability discussed in subsequent chapters of this book.
An emphasis on the structure of information objects in metadata development by the library, archives, and museum communities has perhaps been less overt. However, structure has always been important in information organization and representation, even before computerization. Documentary and publication forms have evolved into industry standards and societal norms and have become almost transparent information management tools.
For example, when users access a birth certificate they can predict its likely structure and content. When academics use a scholarly monograph, they understand intuitively that it will be organized with a table of contents, chapter headings, and an index.
Archivists use the physical structure of their finding aids to provide cues to researchers about the structural relationships between different parts of a record series or manuscript collection.
Archival description also exploits the hierarchical arrangement of records according to the bureaucratic structures, business practices, and personal systems of organization of the creators of those records. However, in recent years there has been increasing criticism that collection-level, hierarchical metadata as exemplified in archival finding aids, while valuable for retaining context and original order, represents an oversimplified view of the actual complexities of records-creation processes and provenance, privileges the scholarly user of the archive and those who are familiar with the structure and function of archival finding aids while leaving the non-expert user baffled, and unnecessarily perpetuates a paper-based descriptive paradigm.
The role of structure in creating and exploiting machine-readable metadata has been growing as computer-processing capabilities become increasingly powerful and sophisticated. Information communities are aware that the more highly structured an information object is, the more that structure can be exploited for searching, manipulating, and interrelating with other information objects. Capturing, documenting, and enforcing that structure, however, can only occur if supported by specific types of metadata.
In short, in an environment where a user can gain unmediated access to information objects over a network, metadata. But there is more to metadata than description and resource discovery. A more inclusive conceptualization of metadata is needed as we consider the range of activities that may be incorporated into digital information systems. Repositories also create metadata relating to the administration, accessioning, preservation, and use of collections. Acquisition records, exhibition catalogs, licensing agreements, and educational metadata are all examples of these other kinds of metadata and data.
Integrated information resources such as virtual museums, digital libraries, and archival information systems include digital versions of actual collection content sometimes referred to as digital surrogates as well as descriptions of that content i.
Incorporating other types of metadata into such resources reaffirms the importance of metadata in administering collections and maintaining their intellectual integrity both in and over time. When applied outside the original repository, the term metadata acquires an even broader scope. An Internet resource provider might use metadata to refer to information that is encoded in HTML meta tags for the purposes of making a website easier to find.
Individuals who are digitizing images might think of metadata as the information they enter into a header field for the digital file to record information about the image file, the imaging process, and image rights. A social science data archivist might use the term to refer to the systems and research documentation necessary to run and interpret a magnetic tape containing raw research data. A digital records archivist might use the term to refer to all the contextual, processing, preservation, and use information needed to identify and document the scope, authenticity, and integrity of an active or archival record in an electronic record-keeping or archival preservation system.
Metadata is crucial in personal information management and digital archiving and for ensuring effective information retrieval and accountability in record- keeping—something that is becoming increasingly important with the rise of electronic commerce and the use of digital content and tools by governments.
In all these diverse interpretations, metadata not only identifies and describes an information object; it also documents how that object behaves, its function and use, its relationship to other information objects, and how it should be and has been managed over time. As this discussion suggests, theory and practices vary considerably due to the differing professional and cultural missions of museums, archives, libraries, and other information and record-keeping communities.
Information professionals have a bewildering array of metadata standards and approaches from which to choose. Many highly detailed metadata standards have been developed by individual communities—e.
If used appropriately and to their fullest extent, these standards have the potential to create extremely rich metadata that provides detailed documentation of record-keeping creation and use in situations in which such activities may be challenged or audited for their comprehensiveness and accuracy. By contrast, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set DCMES identifies a relatively small, generic set of metadata elements that can be used by any community, expert or nonexpert, to describe and search across a wide variety of information resources on the World Wide Web.
Such metadata standards are necessary to ensure that different kinds of descriptive metadata are able to interoperate with one other and with metadata from non-bibliographic systems of the kind that the data management communities and information creators are generating. Relatively lean metadata records such as those created using the DCMES have the advantage of being cheaper to create and maintain, but they may need to be augmented by other types of metadata in order to address the needs of specific user communities and to adequately describe particular types of collection materials.
User-created metadata, both individually contributed and crowd sourced, has been gathering momentum in a variety of venues on the web. Just as many members of the general public have participated in the development of web content, whether by blogging on Tumblr or by uploading photos onto Flickr or videos onto YouTube, they have also been creating, sharing, copying, and mapping metadata.
Among the advantages of these developments is that individual web communities such as affinity groups or hobbyists may be able to create metadata that addresses their specific needs and vocabularies in ways that information professionals who apply metadata standards designed to cater to a wide range of audiences cannot.
User-generated metadata is also a comparatively inexpensive way to augment existing metadata, with the cost and the sense of ownership shared among more parties than just those who create information repositories. The disadvantages of user-generated metadata relate to quality control or lack thereof and idiosyncrasies that can impede the trustworthiness of both metadata and the resource it describes and negatively affect interoperability between metadata and the resources it is intended to describe.
All of these perspectives on metadata should be considered in the development of networked digital information systems, but they lead to a very broad and often confusing conception.
To understand this conception better, it is helpful to separate metadata into distinct categories—administrative, descriptive, preservation, technical, and use metadata—that reflect key aspects of metadata functionality.
Table 2 defines each of these metadata categories and gives examples of common functions that each might perform in a digital information system. In addition to its different types and functions, metadata exhibits many different characteristics.
Table 3 presents some key characteristics of metadata, with examples. Metadata creation and management have become a complex mix of manual and automatic processes and layers created by many different functions and individuals at different points during the life cycle of an information object.
Effective and efficient metadata management is essential to ensure that the metadata we rely on to validate digital resources is itself trustworthy and that the large volume of metadata that potentially can accumulate throughout the life of a resource is subject to a summarization and disposition regime.
Different types of metadata can become associated with an information object by a variety of processes, both manual and automated.
Metadata can also be attached to the information object through bidirectional pointers or hyperlinks, while the relationships between metadata and information objects—and among different aspects of metadata—can be documented by registering them with a metadata registry. As systems designers respond to the need to incorporate and manage metadata in information systems and to address how to ensure the ongoing viability of both information objects and their associated metadata through time, many additional mechanisms for associating metadata with information objects are likely to become available.
Metadata registries and schema record-keeping systems are also more likely to develop as it becomes increasingly necessary to document schema evolution and to alert implementers to version changes. Metadata consists of complex constructs that can be expensive to create and maintain.
How, then, can one justify the cost and effort involved? The development of the World Wide Web and other networked digital information systems has provided information professionals with many opportunities while at the same time requiring them to confront issues that they have not had occasion to explore previously.
Judiciously crafted metadata, wherever possible conforming to national and international standards, has become one of the tools that information professionals are using to exploit some of these opportunities as well as to address some emerging issues, discussed below.
Increased accessibility : Effectiveness of searching can be significantly enhanced through the existence of rich, consistent, carefully crafted descriptive metadata. Metadata can also make it possible to search across multiple collections or to create virtual collections from materials that are distributed across several repositories—but only if the descriptive metadata records are in the same format or have been mapped across the various collections and formats.
Retention of context : Museum, archival, and library repositories do not simply hold objects. They maintain collections of objects that have complex interrelationships and a variety of associations with people, places, movements or styles, and events.
In the digital world it is not unusual for a single object from a collection to be digitized and then for that digital surrogate to become separated from both its own cataloging information descriptive metadata and its relationship to the other objects in the same collection, resulting in a decontextualized information object. Metadata plays a crucial role in documenting and maintaining important relationships as well as in indicating the authenticity, structural and procedural integrity, and degree of completeness of information objects.
In an archive, for example, by documenting the content, context, and structure of an archival record, metadata in the form of an archival finding aid is what helps to distinguish that record from decontextualized information. Expanding use : Digital information systems for museum and archival collections make it easier to disseminate digital versions of unique objects to users around the globe who, for reasons of geography, economics, or other barriers, might otherwise not have an opportunity to view them.
With new communities of users, however, come new challenges concerning how to make the materials most intellectually accessible. These new communities may have significantly different needs, cultural perspectives, language skills, and information-seeking behaviors from those of the traditional users for whom many existing information services were originally designed.
Teaching and learning: K—12 teachers and students may want to search for and use information objects in quite different ways from those of scholarly researchers. Instructors may wish to develop lesson plans or to scaffold learning so that students build on prior knowledge or are introduced to technical terminology.
Specialized forms of metadata have been developed to address these needs. System development and enhancement : Metadata can document changing uses of systems and content, and that information can, in turn, feed back into systems-development decisions.
Well-structured metadata can also facilitate an almost infinite number of ways for users to search for information, to present results, and even to manipulate and to present information objects without compromising their integrity. Multiversioning : The existence of information about, and surrogates of, cultural objects in digital form has heightened interest in the ability to create multiple and variant versions of information objects.
This process may be as simple as creating both a high-resolution copy of a digital image for preservation or scholarly research uses and a low-resolution thumbnail image that can be rapidly transferred over a network for quick reference purposes.
Or it may involve creating variant or derivative forms to be used, for example, in publications, exhibitions, or schoolrooms. In either case, there must be metadata to relate the multiple versions of a given information object and to capture what is the same and what is different about each version.
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