Metadata: Origins and Metaphors

The word metadata combines the Greek prefix “meta-,” in the sense of above or beyond, with “data,” a fact or piece of information (discussed elsewhere in this volume). The resulting concept of metadata suggests “something that is beyond the data: a statement or statements about the data.”¹ While a potentially infinite variety of information might be included in such “information about” other information or resources, in the context of collections and repositories the word generally refers to information that is used to enable the discovery, use, management, grouping, or preservation of information resources.²

Multiple points of origin have been suggested for the word metadata and its use in resource description. Pomerantz suggests the word is a “deliberate play” on the usage of “meta-“ as applied in Metaphysics, the title applied to the collected works of Aristotle that dealt with topics “beyond” the Physics.³ Another story suggests current usage of the term in libraries, at least if “spelled with an initial capital or all capitals, was actually coined by Jack E. Myers in the late 1960s and registered in 1986 as a trademark of the Metadata Company.”⁴ Leaving aside the possible implication that anything referred to as metadata must be a current or future product of that company, the usage of metadata in this essay assumes that current, and more generalized usage explored here, is the sense of the word as it has “entered the public domain.”⁵

Whatever the origins of “metadata,” since the 1990s the term has been broadly used within cultural heritage organizations to describe information about collection resources. This usage coincided with the rise of the World Wide Web and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). By 1995, with the first “Dublin Core” workshop, which resulted in the creation and promulgation of the Dublin Core Element Set, the word metadata had worked its way into “the working vocabulary of mainstream librarianship.”⁶

The multiple points of origin for metadata as a word, and a concept, suggest why the term seems at once so capacious but also highly technical and precise. While the usage came from the world of computing, where it referred to the way that operating systems and networks managed and transported digital resources, it easily mapped conceptually onto the practices of resource description in libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). As Campbell points out, this diversity of stakeholders offers a productive tension: since “metadata has evolved from several different communities,” it requires a “theoretical paradigm that will enable us to distinguish between different activities that have the same labels, and to recognize similar activities labeled differently.”⁷ Gill suggests that, as the word has become “increasingly adopted and co-opted by more diverse communities, its definition has grown in scope to include almost anything that describes anything else.”⁸ This breadth of usage, however, may be an opportunity that opens up a chance for dialogue between stakeholder communities and cross-pollination of practice.

To address the multiple possible meanings of metadata, Campbell develops a framework based in language. This extends the legacy of Svenonius’s approach to information organization, which posited that “information is organized by describing it using a special-purpose language.”⁹ This underlies a key insight of metadata work as derived from bibliographic practice, which suggests that descriptive, bibliographic metadata is rooted in specific and formulaic language use within a controlled system. Campbell extends this approach to elaborate a theory that describes information used for resource discovery as “metonymic” (a catalog record is a surrogate for the resource it describes) and information for resource use and management as “metaphoric” (information that provides a paradigm for how a resource might be used).¹⁰ In the latter case, a resource with a content type of “text” might logically be assumed to be read.

Metadata work, as an interdisciplinary area of practice, draws together multiple information communities, and potentially allows for a productive exchange of perspectives. In this spirit, Mitchell describes metadata work as a “boundary object.”¹¹ Following this idea, metadata work illustrates aspects of Star’s characterization of boundary objects as “plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints, . . . yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. . . . They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation.”¹² One of Star’s canonical forms of boundary objects is the “standard form.” In the case of collectors for the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology was a standard way for them to note factual information such as species, date, and location of collection, all of which would now be understood as “standardized information” to build and organize the museum’s collections.¹³ In other words, metadata about a museum’s collections. Importantly, boundary objects “may be abstract or concrete,” thus encompassing both metadata’s instantiation in system memory and storage, but also in the various work areas surrounding it, including description, standardization, creation, operation and analysis, and exchange. In this view, metadata work occupies an interstitial, community-connecting space, productively bridging descriptive traditions in cultural heritage with approaches from the web and digital culture, records management, as well as information technology.

While metadata work may have multiple origins, the two perspectives outlined above offer useful frameworks for understanding metadata as an area of information work. The first view understands metadata as a special use of language, in particular language used to provide “information about” resources in a collection or system. The second view illustrates that metadata work may encompass multiple spheres of activity with similar ends of organizing and managing information, which may operate under different means or names, but can still be understood as shared area of work that offers opportunities for negotiation and translation.

Note: this post excerpts a draft of a larger essay that I am currently working on for an edited volume. Stay tuned for that as the canonical, extended version of the thoughts below.

Update: the full draft is now posted, and comments or suggestions are welcome at the PubPub platform: https://digital-preservation-a-critical-vocabulary.pubpub.org/pub/2ib9hvvg.

Endnotes

1. Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata, The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2015), 6; Steven Jack Miller, Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-to-Do-It Manual, 2nd ed. (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2022), 1. And others. ↩

2. The specific distinction of organizing information resources and organizing “information about” those resources is further elaborated by Glushko et al. in The Discipline of Organizing (2013), but this formulation as a useful way to talk about metadata occurs in other definitions, too (e.g., Caplan 2003). ↩

3. Pomerantz, Metadata, 5. ↩

4. Priscilla Caplan, Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians (Chicago: American Library Association, 2003), 1. ↩

5. Caplan, Metadata Fundamentals, 1. ↩

6. Caplan, Metadata Fundamentals, 2; see also S. Weibel, “Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery,” Request for Comments (Internet Engineering Task Force, 1998), https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2413.txt; Miller, Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-to-Do-It Manual. ↩

7. D. Grant Campbell, “Metadata, Metaphor, and Metonymy,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40, no. 3/4 (2005): 58–59, https://doi.org/10.1300/J104v40n03_04. ↩

8. Tony Gill, “Metadata and the Web,” in Introduction to Metadata, ed. Murtha Baca, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2016), https://www.getty.edu/publications/intrometadata/metadata-and-the-web/. ↩

9. Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2000), 1, https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262512619/the-intellectual-foundation-of-information-organization/. ↩

10. Campbell, “Metadata, Metaphor, and Metonymy.” ↩

11. Erik Mitchell, Metadata Standards and Web Services in Libraries, Archives, and Museums: An Active Learning Resource (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2015). ↩

12. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (August 1989): 393, https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001. ↩

13. Star and Griesemer, 410. ↩