Metadata  

“Seeing Standards” by Jenn  Riley and Devin Becker

About Us:

The Resource Access Team at the University of Connecticut Libraries provides leadership to the Library on descriptive cataloging, subject analysis, classification, metadata standards and other means that distribute metadata to members of the University of Connecticut community. The Team will be responsive to users’ research needs and continually seek innovative efficiencies and process improvements to meet those needs.

Metadata:

Generally defined as “data about data”, metadata can be more easily understood as structured information about resources that help individuals find, identify, select, and access those resources. Metadata as structured information about resources also help organize, index, collocate, preserve, structure, and manage those resources. More specifically, metadata can fall into the following broad and sometimes overlapping categories.

• Descriptive Metadata

Descriptive metadata describes the intellectual content of a resource. Finding aids, catalog records in Homer, or a description of a thesis in Commons are examples of descriptive metadata. Descriptive metadata supports indexing, collocating, discovery, identification, selection, and access. There are a number of descriptive metadata standards, with include metadata structure standards (element sets or schemes/schemas), metadata value standards (controlled vocabularies or syntax encoding schemes), metadata exchange formats, metadata models/frameworks.

• Administrative Metadata

Administrative metadata describes who can access the data and includes information on the history and status of a resource in a repository. Typically, administrative metadata is locally defined rather than conforming to a national standard.

• Technical Metadata

Technical metadata describes how resources were created and includes information on their format and other technical characteristics. Technical metadata also describes resources are stored and where they are located. There are a number of national technical metadata standards. Sometimes technical metadata can also be locally defined.

• Structural Metadata

Structural metadata describes how different pieces of a resource come together to make that resource an entire whole. Structure metadata includes information on the logical or physical organization of a resource while describing the relationships of the parts to other parts and those parts to the whole. For example, structural metadata allows users to select a song from an album or a scene from a video file. There are a number of different standards for structure metadata.

• Preservation Metadata

Preservation metadata describes how a resource can be keep usable over long periods of time. In this regard, though there a number of metadata standards specific to preservation, almost any kind of metadata will help with preserving a resource and preserving its history.

• Rights Metadata

Rights metadata describes the copyright status and any permission, agreements, terms and conditions, and licensing information associated with a resource. There are a number of standards for rights metadata but this information can also be included in other types of metadata.