1. Metadata - what works, what doesn’t?
Stephanie Taylor
UKOLN, University of Bath
E -
UKOLN is supported by:
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat)

2. About Me Stephanie Taylor: Work with UKOLN as a research officer
Work on the practical side of institutional repositories
Worked on the first phase of the RSP
UKOLN:
National centre of expertise in digital information management
Located at the University of Bath

3. What Is Metadata?
Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.
Source: NISO (2004) Understanding Metadata. Bethesda, NISO Press.

4. Metadata is… Structured data about “something” Text Images Sound
Movement
Objects
Events
Services

5. Metadata is… Encountered every day Timetables Directories
Internet shopping sites, etc

6. Metadata is… Stored in - Databases, repositories Web pages Carriers
Formats (e.g. MARC)
Markup languages (e.g. HTML, SGML, XML)

7. Types of metadata Descriptive Structural Administrative
Rights management metadata
Preservation metadata

8. Why do you need it? To enable discovery of your digitised material
To enable harvesting of your digitised material by external systems
To help you organise your digitised material
To support archiving and preservation

9. Metadata Schemas
A metadata scheme is a sets of metadata elements designed for a specific purpose, such as describing a particular type of information resource.

10. Current Standards
“Standards are like toothbrushes, everyone agrees that they’re a good idea but nobody wants to use anyone else’s.” From a Murtha Baca presentation
Dublin Core (Simple, Qualified, Application Profiles)
MARC, ONIX
EAD
MODS, METS, DIDL, PREMIS, MIX, RSLP-CD etc.

11. Out of the box…
Realistically most people when first establishing online digitised resource will work with what comes out of the box … but fields can be added and schemes customised.
Explore types and field structures at an early stage and set up your metadata scheme.
Consider local needs such as departmental and project work structures and any local decisions needed about subject fields etc.

12. The “Other” Repositories
What *might* be a repository?
Flickr?
Google Docs?
YouTube?
SlideShare?
Wikipedia?
Twitter?

13. Folksonomy & Tagging Metadata for the people, by the peopl Keywords
Descriptive
Created by and for human beings
Inconsistent
Personal
Shared
Created on the fly
Unstructured