Having previously commented on the relative absence of books presenting a “comprehensive and seasoned” view of metadata, it is a delight to see another addition to the literature about metadata – particularly one which both provides practical pointers and offers critical reflection on the topic. Metadata: A Cataloger's Primer, strives to address two distinct issues: the intellectual foundations of metadata, and metadata's practical application. The book's stated audiences are cataloguers and students of library and information science, and the articles generally take traditional library theory perspectives and assumptions as their starting point.
The book is a collection of articles simultaneously published as an issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly and, for better and worse, the book is shaped by its special issue origin. The first part of the collection comprises six articles grouped under the heading “Intellectual Foundations” and the longer second part comprises five articles under the heading “How to create, apply, and use metadata”. These two parts of the book are quite distinct in style and level and, to some degree, make strange bedfellows.
In the first part, the book's origin as a journal results in a mix of articles which, although including some gems and offering much needed theoretical and philosophical analysis of metadata, borders on the quirky (both in terms of topics covered and research methods employed). The mix offers articles varying in granularity from discussing an individual element to discussing multiple schemas. It covers areas of interest from the formal application of cataloguing theory in new settings, through the relationship between digital object and description, to observing individuals' filing habits. To support these developments the collection draws on a range of philosophical backgrounds including Kant, historicism, Saussure, Barthes, and Foucault.
The articles in the second part have a more coherent approach and offer a detailed introduction to particular standards and their implementation (covering Dublin Core, EAD and EAC, XML, METS, and planning a repository). Although the second section feels a bit like an introductory text at times, it provides a good detailed overview of each of these standards and often includes useful accounts of the origin of these standards.
Although some of these articles may go on to be influential in their own right, the strength of the book is as a collection of attempts to provide a theoretical framework and history of the interaction of cataloguing and metadata – these perspectives are diverse enough to enable a wide variety of readers to engage with metadata. The practical materials also provide a useful reference, with some comment on standards, their history and their implementation. The weakness of the book lies in what it is missing – throughout the articles there seems to be little presentation of how metadata is unlike traditional cataloguing. The otherwise good discussion about historical and conceptual differences and similarities between bibliographic standards and metadata schemas lacks discussion about how this effects cataloguing as such. An example of this is the level of description appropriate to apply to a transitory and changeable digital object or the alternative divisions of labour to create non‐bibliographic metadata.
This collection provides a welcome addition to the metadata bookshelf and the theoretical sections hopefully point to a wider maturity and reflectiveness in the field.
Although, the theoretical part of the book may prove more durable than the how‐to section (which is necessarily dependent on schema detail), this book deserves to make it onto librarians' shelves and cataloguing course reading lists.
