The National Library uses metadata extensively to catalogue and manage its collections and to exchange information with other organisations.
We have developed a framework to help decide which kinds of metadata we will use, and follow international standards wherever possible.
What is metadata?
Metadata is 'structured data about data' - it describes something (physical or electronic) you don’t have in front of you. Some examples are: a name in the telephone book, the label on a bottle, search results in a web search engine like Google, tags inside an MP3 file, and a library catalogue entry. You can use metadata to view or organise things in your mind, on paper, or in a computer.
There is a growing amount of information online. The desire to use machines to find and process this information means metadata is becoming more important and widespread.
The four main types of metadata are:
- Resource discovery - for finding and identifying
- Structural - for viewing and using
- Rights management and Access control - for protection of property rights, authentication and authorisation
- Technical and Administrative - for managing.1
Metadata schemes define the structure different types of metadata follow. There are many international standards for metadata schemes, and also many local or industry-based schemes.
Controlled vocabularies (also called pick-lists, ontologies or thesauri) are lists of "preferred terms" that are used to make metadata consistent. This means you don’t have to search for all the different ways that people might describe the same thing.
1 Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives, by A. Kenney and O. Rieger, 2000.
Who should use metadata?
Metadata is useful for managing collections of things or as a way of providing access to content you have created. By adding metadata to things that you create you can make it easier to find and use them. Examples include the document properties in a word processing file, 'meta' tags in an HTML web page, or tags inside an MP3 file.
How the Library uses metadata
We use metadata extensively to catalogue and manage our various collections, and for exchanging information with other organisations.
Our Metadata Standards Framework guides which metadata schemes we use. We follow international standards wherever possible.
More about our Metadata Standards Framework
Common metadata schemes we use are:
- MARC (Machine Readable Cataloguing)
- ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description)
- RAD (Rules for Archival Description)
- DCMES (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set)
- EAD (Encoded Archival Description)
- METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard)
Application Profiles
An Application Profile specifies how you have decided to use one or more standard metadata schemes to make them more relevant to what you are doing. You might choose only certain parts of one scheme and/or state which parts are mandatory or optional in your data.
Our Digital Resource Description (DRD) application profile provides a way to describe and link to digital items. We have used DRD for the metadata in the digital collections Matapihi and Discover – Te Kohinga Taonga.
The NZGLS (New Zealand Government Locator Service) metadata standard is an Application Profile for using Dublin Core metadata in the New Zealand government.
