Digital Library

MetaData
Sources
Metadata
“Often described as data about data, is critical
to all forms of organized digital content. ”
 I s information that is analyzed.
Highly-organized and readily accessible
Structured Information through structured query language or
other forms of search.

Unstructured information is more difficult to

Unstructured Information define, and at most organizations, far more
common than structured data assets.
 Metadata is generally taken to
be structured information
about a particular information
resource.

Information is “structured” if it
can be meaningfully manipulated
without understanding its content.
Allen. project

01 Structure is really there

Why do we need
structure? 02
Structure provides a way to name
things
The role of metadata in your digital library can be clarified by considering such questions as:

Where does your metadata come from? Is it Can you monitor the metadata in your library to
automatically extracted from digital objects, manually continually assess its quality?
assigned, or imported from an external source?

How will the metadata affect document display, Is the metadata private to your library or can it be
browsing, searching, and maintenance of the digital shared with others?
library?

Does the metadata need any extra processing Can you migrate your metadata to another software
before use? For example, do different versions of application?
people’s names need to be harmonized?

Is the metadata in your digital library affected by the

activities of the end-users?
 They are highly structured packages of
information that explain the content,

Metadata 01 quality and characteristics of the data

on the website.

Characteristics
They are precise and in many cases
02 short and made up of simple words.
Among the main characteristics of
metadata are the following:

03 They offer access points to the

information on the website.

They encode the description of the

04
website.
 Gradually, physical descriptions grew
very complex and very large, as
illustrated by the card catalogs of the
20th century

(Figure 6.1).
 Administrative metadata for managing
resources, such as rights information;

Descriptive metadata for describing

resources;

Function of different
types of metadata Preservation metadata for describing
resources, such as recording
preservation actions;

Technical metadata related to low-level

system information, such as data
formats and any data compression
used;

Usage metadata related to system use,

such as tracking user behavior.
Bibliographic Metadata

Working with digital libraries needs to

know about the different standard
methods for representing document
metadata. Much of the work on
metadata in digital libraries is based on
practices that have been adopted in
library cataloging, particularly the MARC
(machine-readable cataloging) format
that has been used by libraries
internationally for decades.
 MARC

[The MARC standard] forever changed the

relationship of a library to its users, and the
relationship of geography to information.

By Henriette Avram
1960s

MARC is a comprehensive and
detailed standard whose use is
carefully controlled and
transmitted to budding librarians
in library science courses.
MARC
Managing metadata with software tools has a
long history in libraries, mostly deriving from the
necessity to move from card catalogs to
computer-based records.
The core work was the development of the MARC
standard in the late 1960s by Henriette Avram at
the Library of Congress.
Once metadata was expressed in computer-based
MARC records, it could be copied, distributed, and
shared among libraries.