In the age of an abundance of information, we need to provide quality resources and organise them to facilitate effective access through their description. Hider focuses on the second of these, providing a “big picture” introduction to the description of information resources across a range of disciplines including libraries, archives, and museums. He deals with both traditional practices and new approaches to metadata creation and management, noting that while “the digital” is here to stay, older practices will continue to influence the way we describe information resources for a while to come.
The last 15-20 years have seen a growing involvement of users with information seeking, but this is not always reflected in the literature discussing metadata. Here, Hider keeps the users of metadata firmly in mind and encourages the reader to consider them too; a welcome change from the system-focused texts that all too often dominate such discussions.
The first chapter gives a series of definitions and scopes the book's approach. This is an excellent introduction to the various aspects of metadata, and is a useful summary of these aspects in its own right. The examples that support the discussion are well-chosen from everyday life and provide the student and non-expert with familiar context for comparison. Chapter 2 moves on to the attributes of information resources and the way these relate to users, contexts, and functions of metadata.
Chapters 3 and 4 present the information retrieval systems that hold metadata and the sources of metadata, including end users. Chapter 5 considers the quality of metadata and what makes it effective, concluding with brief evaluations of quality assurance and cost-benefit analysis, while Chapter 6 looks at the sharing of metadata, predominantly (but not only) catalogue records, and the need for interoperability.
Chapter 7 is a substantial chapter on metadata standards that explains what the standards are, and how and why they are (or were) used. It covers those used on the web, in libraries (including digital and audiovisual libraries), archives, and museums, with briefer sections dealing with book publishing, indexing (book and database), the impact of open access, and government document metadata (among others). The breadth of coverage here is impressive without being daunting.
Chapter 8 discusses various vocabularies that can be used in resource description, and Chapter 9 looks to the future, contextualising the use of metadata in an online world. It considers the progress that has been made towards content-based information retrieval and social metadata, and evaluates these in the light of professional description. The book ends with “Further reading” and a comprehensive list of metadata standards covering archival description, cataloguing, indexing and abstracting, schemas, vocabularies, classification, and encoding and transmission standards. This in itself is a good map of the broader resource description landscape.
Hider explains clearly the wide range of metadata that exists, and helps the reader further by guiding through the book with cross-references and direction. We know there is “more on this to come in the next chapter” or if we missed a detail, we can go back and locate it in context. This is useful for those learning the subject, as well as the more expert reader. Hider does an impressive job tying together so many different aspects of metadata and providing the “big picture”, and the book is highly accessible and engaging.
