Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians

Citation

Gawne, J. (2004), "Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians", Library Management, Vol. 25 No. 1/2, pp. 83-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120410510355

Priscilla Caplan (assistant director for Digital Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation, Gainsville) intended this monograph to be an “introduction to metadata for librarians and others working in a library environment”. Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians is a well‐organised and easily read book that admirably succeeds in her expressed intention.

Caplan’s book commences with a question that is familiar for members of the metadata community: “what is metadata?” After an overview of some of the definitions that abound, she defines metadata within the context of this work as “structured information about an information resource of any media type or format”. She then proceeds to define types of metadata and give overviews of metadata schemes and levels of description.

In the early chapters of this book, Caplan provides extremely useful summaries of some formats and methods used for representing, exchanging and storing metadata, the use of vocabularies, classification schemes and identifiers, approaches to interoperability, and metadata in the context of the Web. This chapter is worth reading for its succinct description of the workings of search engines alone.

The second part of this work deals with metadata schemes, from the nineteenth century (Cutter’s Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue) to very current preoccupations (the use of metadata in rights management). This section is ambitious in coverage, for example, descriptions of metadata for art and architecture and for geospatial and environmental resources sit alongside those for the usual suspects of MARC, DC, and IMS, and succeeds in providing quite a panoramic view of metadata and its various uses and applications. Although densely packed with information, these chapters are clearly written and very readable. (I do wish the same could be said of more literature in this subject!)

Scope notes under the references provided as “readings” at the end of each chapter are useful in giving readers access to information that could not be included in this monograph. Examples of metadata records intersperse the work and usefully illustrate different structures and principles that are used to describe different information resources. The 12‐page glossary is a treasure and the index is generally comprehensive and reliable (I did find one error in the index).

In her preface, Caplan makes it clear that this work was not intended to provide a comprehensive description of all metadata schemes and has provided references to metadata clearinghouses for those who wish to read more about schemes and applications not covered in this book. The work focuses for the most part on the USA, with some mention of European and Australian metadata initiatives. Notably, most of the chapter on metadata for government information concentrates on the US government scheme GILS that is barely used outside the USA, as admitted in the concluding paragraph of the chapter.

While the USA emphasis is unsurprising, given that the task of choosing what to include and what to omit is extremely difficult in a book of this kind, it is disappointing that so much great work being undertaken by metadata communities all around the world is not mentioned at all. This is particularly so when the projects involve unusual media, rare resources, and/or resources in a language other than English or in more than one language. I feel that metadata initiatives outside North America and Europe are under‐represented in the literature generally, and that this is a great pity.

I did find the short treatment accorded to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) surprising, as the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH) is enabling the sharing of metadata between data providers and service providers around the world, thus providing improved access to resources. Then again, OAI is getting a great deal of coverage in the literature, whereas some of the schemes and applications covered in Caplan’s work are quite new (to me, at least) and fascinating.

To conclude, Priscilla Caplan has written a very useful and readable work. The book’s structure allows a reader to focus on a particular topic within the metadata universe and come away with sound basic information and references for further research.