The Organization of Information

Chapter 7 Metadata:  Description

Of her beloved Romeo Montague, Shakespeare's Juliet Capulet ponders:

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

The young maiden is in love with Romeo. She is convinced that if Romeo were not a Montague, her parents and other relatives would be unable to deny Romeo's sweetness, too.

On the contrary, when describing metadata, one must be very concerned with names. There are particular descriptors for particular items. When creating metadata--data about data--for a resource,
1. provide a description of the resource. Be sure to include any pertinent information that will aid in managing and preserving it,
2.  provide ways to access the description, and
3.  encode the information resource, (book, CD, DVD, etc.). Encoding will enable each part of the item to be displayed and searched for according to the wishes of whomever creates the way in which the resource will be displayed.
These surrogate records, explanations of the title, creator, subject, etc., of an information resource must be exact so the desired information can be retrieved from each query.

The International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is a schema, or set of metadata elements set aside for a particular type of resource, used in metadata description.  The prescribed punctuation (commas, colons, semicolons and more) in a record serves to precede and predict the data that follows. Also, since each of the eight areas of the ISBD contains more than one element, the order of the data is prescribed. Area 1 contains the title and statement of responsibility whereas Area 8 has information that identifies the resource and its terms of availability. The ISBD, DACS (Describing Archives:  A Content Standard) and VRA (Visual Resources Association) are just three of many sets of standards by which books, works of art, cultural objects, archival documents and more are described in a consistent manner, one that is oftentimes dependent upon the community for which the resources were created.