Any organization/company with data needs metadata. This concept is fairly well known, but to be clear, without metadata, the data being looked for is as good as deleted! Metadata is the way to search for and, most importantly, locate information. And metadata governance ensures that the data is consistent and can be used inter-operably for various purposes, including identifying trends.
Librarians interact with metadata all day, everyday. The entire foundation of the library is built on metadata. It’s how items are retrieved effortlessly. It’s how they are accounted for. Without metadata, items in the library would be lost at sea.
(Normally,) each item in a library is “cataloged,” which means that metadata has been assigned to it. Certain rules in librarianship dictate the metadata schema, including which fields are required and which are optional. As well, the rules determine how fields are filled out and to what extent. This governance leads to consistent data that is easily transferable across libraries. In fact, organizations such as the Library of Congress, OCLC (a prominent library organization) and publishing houses will create catalog records for items that can travel with the purchase of books or be downloaded into the local library system – all because of good governance.
This means that librarians don’t often create metadata schemas from scratch during the cataloging process. They will, however, often edit the schema to add “local fields” and devise their own rules for entering data in those fields. These rules are documented so that all current and future librarians will enter data consistently.
The metadata librarians provide for physical books include descriptive, structural, and administrative. Archivists who catalog collections will use those types of metadata and also include information on provenance and preservation. Archivists also include metadata in “finding aids,” or descriptive documents about a collection. Finding aids may be paper-based, XML-based, or both.
But cataloging is not the only area in which librarians (and archivists) use metadata. Librarians are well-known for collecting data on item usage, housing/environment conditions, reference questions/research requests, and more. Librarians devise a metadata schema and rules for entering data so that trends can be gleaned over time.
As a librarian and archivist, I have worked with metadata thousands upon thousands of times. It’s part of the daily routine. From online cataloging, to creating finding aids both in Word and in XML, to collecting usage data, metadata is a large part of library and archives, and the knowledge and skills behind it easily transferable to all fields and sectors.
This includes, of course, librarians managing DAMs, where metadata is all-important. Digital assets require the same types of metadata librarians are used to: administrative, descriptive, technical, usage, and rights, for example. The rules librarians create and follow for entering metadata is part of the governance that regulates the DAM. With the right metadata, finding the required asset can be as effortless as retrieving a book in a library.