Metadata and Labelling

Data and Labelling

Metadata. Sound scary? Don’t be put off!

Metadata is data about data. It gives us information about the data we have collected. Descriptive metadata is really important for good archiving. You can write metadata out in notebooks, spreadsheets, word docs, or programmes especially built for it – but it is the quality of the metadata that matters. Interoperable formats (e.g. CSV instead of Excel, Docx instead of Doc) are preferable.

Recommended Metadata Fields:

• Title of item
• Creator
• Subject*
• Description (what is it? If it is an image file, what does it display?)
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Data (of creation or publication)
• Type/genre of item
• Format (physical/digital)
• Identifier (a unique reference from your own filing system)
• Source (an archival reference or original location, URL)
• Language
• Coverage (the location and/or time period referenced by the resource)
• Rights (who owns the item)

*The subject is the topic of the resource. To describe them, it is helpful to use vocabularies. Vocabularies are fixed terms used to describe material from a particular domain/subject – e.g. archaeology, music. There are also ‘general’ vocabularies that can be applied to all sorts of material. A famous example of this is the Library of Congress Subject Headings.