Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information

If you use nearly any digital technology, you make use of metadata. Use an ATM today? You interacted with metadata about your account. Searched for songs in iTunes or Spotify? You used metadata about those songs. We use and even create metadata constantly, but we rarely realize it. Metadata -- or data about data -- describes real and digital objects, so that those objects may be organized now and found later.

Metadata is a tool that enables the information age functions performed by humans as well as those performed by computers. Metadata is important to many fields, particularly Computer Science; but this course is not purely a Computer Science course. This course approaches Metadata from the perspective of Information Science, which is a broad interdisciplinary field that studies how people create and manage information.

Unit 1: Organizing Information
Unit 2: Dublin Core
Unit 3: How to Build a Metadata Schema
Unit 4: Alphabet Soup: Metadata Schemas That You (Will) Know and Love
Unit 5: Metadata for the Web
Unit 6: Metadata for Networks
Unit 7: How to Create Metadata
Unit 8: How to Evaluate Metadata