This book can be best summed up by the word comprehensive, though there was one particular omission that I think would be noticed by most record managers. It covers the creation, management and use of metadata from its historical beginnings as library catalogues to the Web 2.0 social tagging of online resources. Along the way it describes what metadata is, who creates it, who uses it, what systems you will find it in and the standards and vocabularies used to control it. The viewpoint is centred on the English speaking world, but other European standards and perspectives are included.
This is obviously intended to be a practical guide. The emphasis throughout is on what a particular tool can do to help an end user find the information resource(s) they need. As such, folksonomies, where end users label information resources using their own words, get the same balanced view as to their usefulness as a controlled vocabulary like the Library of Congress Subject Headings does. All tools available are considered on their own merits.
The book would be very useful for a library student or a librarian. Particular emphasis is given to the future of cataloguing which the author sees as morphing into the more holistic metadata librarian role. Rather than simply describing an information resource, the metadata librarian will be maintaining the systems using metadata for both physical and online resources. While the emphasis is definitely on library use of metadata, resources available to archivists and museum curators are definitely included. From this university records manager's perspective, the sections in chapter seven on e-research and education were also very interesting.
The author makes the point that while archives and museums with their unique collections and objects had previously not needed the same standardisation that drove libraries to pool cataloguing resources, the Internet has given new opportunities to make end users aware of what is available. Wanting a collection or information resource to be picked up by Google and other search engines has driven a need for greater standardisation for description. The sections on, for example, the Resource Description and Access standard (RDA), ISAD(G) and on the markup languages show the ways in which archivists and curators can use the Internet to get their collections in front of end users. It is typical of this book that the viewpoint is on how the Internet can be used, rather than it being a threat.
The book ends on the note that even with end users supplying their own terms and computers becoming more sophisticated, professional metadata creators and managers will still be needed for their more objective views and the wealth of experience they have. Computers in particular are still likely to see an information resource as “a bag of words” and end users may not be willing to put the work in to resource description that a paid professional will do.
Is the book useful to the records manager? Possibly if working in the public sector as government metadata standards are mentioned, though these are likely to already been known to records professionals working in this sector. One major omission to my mind was the Keyword AAA thesaurus, strange in a book written by an Australian. Records management use of metadata is not thoroughly covered, though the ISO standard is mentioned. However, as an overview of why we create metadata and how to manage it, the book covers pretty much everything else and would be a useful resource for any informational professional working with metadata.
