2 Why is Metadata Important?

Good metadata helps people to save time while looking for things or information, make sense of the things they find, and explore other like things.

Have you ever made a Works Cited page or Bibliography for a paper? If so, then you’ve already created metadata, and it’s metadata that would help other users of that source locate the exact item from which you quoted. For instance, if I said that metadata are “Structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information-bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, management, and preservation of the described entities,” I would be quoting from a book titled Metadata. But which book called Metadata? There are multiple. So the book’s title is only one way to find the thing we want to find, and sometimes not the best way. This is why we add other metadata to our Works Cited entry (in this case I’ll use MLA format):

Zeng, Marcia Lei, and Jian Qin. Metadata. American Library Association, 2020.

OK, great, now one can feel reasonably assured that the right book can be located to find the quotation above. But it’s a big book! That’s why we’d add one more piece of metadata…

Zeng, Marcia Lei, and Jian Qin. Metadata. American Library Association, 2020, p. 14.

Now any reader can find exactly where I got the quote! Also, they can explore that book for other information that helps make sense of the quote, or they can explore other titles from the American Library Association or by the authors.