7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Metadata Management System for Digital Resources
Akhtar Hussain and Javed Asim
Abstract
This paper indicates the concept of metadata. Defined simply, it is “data about data”.
There are three kinds of metadata associated with digital objects: Descriptive or
content, Structural and Administrative metadata. It can generally be viewed as being
of various types: Dublin Core, MARC, Global Information Locator service etc. The
paper also discusses, how the metadata is structured. Finally, it indicates basic
metadata components for data, creation, elements, protocal and a guide for Libraries.
1. Introduction
Metadata is a description of an information resource, and hence can be thought of as ‘data
about data ;within the context of the world wide web metadata may be used for
information discovery ,but metadata is also important in the context of cataloguing
resource within the advent of the Dublin core the text encoding initiative (TEI) guidelines
the Government Information locator Service (GILS), and other such constructs, the
concept of data about data and what to do with it has again become a discussion point in
librarianship. As the methods available for describing information grow beyond MARC, it
becomes increasingly apparent that librarians, and more specifically catalogers, have a role
to play as mediators and creates of an increasingly diverse landscape of descriptive
methods. As the choices for providing access increase, the experience and traditions that
the cataloging profession can bring to the creation, standardization, and manipulation of
metadata systems becomes obvious.
By mediating the use of metadata, cataloguers provide for these developing systems of
description and access a strong influence towards standardization. Cataloging exists as an
often-invisible process of order making. As constituencies develop systems for ordering in
the digital world, what was once a largely invisible process becomes glaringly apparent.
Granularity is the level at which metadata is applied to an object or set of object. The
expense of creating metadata is directly proportional to the degree of granularity. In depth
metadata creation requires more effort, which in turn costs more. For example in a
traditional library the entire set of volumes for any journal can be described by one entry.
This represents ‘coarse’ level of granularity. But in case of e-journals, links are provided
for all volumes, indexes, individual article, etc. which is a case of ‘fine’ level of
granularity.
2. What is Metadata?
In simple way “Metadata” is a data about data, but basically it is a “structured data about
data”. It gives information about the data, which are stored on web. Each and every page
of any website concerns with the metadata. Those metadata keeps information about the
page on which the page talks
________________________________________________________________________
Department of Library & Information Science, CCS, University, Meerut (U P).
E-mail: ahussain_47@yahoomail.co.in
77