The title under review is an excellent work designed for all information professionals working in television and motion pictures production. The work is a first attempt to provide “an introduction for those involved operationally in making television programs or archiving and caring for the completed programs”. Thus it is both a beginner's guide and a somewhat advanced overview of the vast field of metadata for television programmes, and covers the topic quite comprehensively. By presenting the details of television production to librarians and archivists, and metadata elements and processes to the technical team members involved in television production, this book brings together two communities associated with television programmes.
The work is organised into seven chapters. The first chapter breaks many myths associated with the concept of metadata. The next two chapters discuss metadata types and purpose; and metadata schemes, structures and encoding. Metadata structure standards (from the broadcasting industry, press industry, library and information services sector, and archival sector), metadata rules standards, and metadata value standards are briefly explained in the third chapter. The fourth chapter explains the impact of technology change on people and metadata processes. Ownership, legal and business aspects of metadata and the application of metadata to different systems are explained convincingly in this chapter. Identifiers used for television programmes stored in the digital domain are explained, and a summary of various registered identifiers is tabulated in the fifth chapter. Consumer‐relevant identifiers are also briefly discussed in this chapter. The sixth chapter exhaustively deals with metadata for the consumer or end‐user. It discusses users' needs, and metadata as a connector between broadcast content and Internet content. The last chapter discusses metadata for public collections of television programmes and newsfilm. There are two appendices: appendix 1 shows sample metadata records from leading public television stations in the US and also lists resources from where sample metadata records can be reviewed; appendix 2 presents extracts from the Descriptive Metadata Scheme of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and their Metadata Dictionary. A detailed index helps locate relevant information in the book.
The book would be a useful tool for all practitioners involved in creating metadata for television programmes and newsfilm, and for media librarians and archivists. As the popularity and spread of digital and Internet television is expanding in less developed countries of the world, practitioners in these countries would require books such as this one in order to understand and manage film, digital and broadcast collections. It would also be worthwhile as an introductory book for students and teachers in schools of librarianship and archival studies that offer courses in cataloguing and metadata for digital and non‐print sources.
