Origins

For as long as libraries, museums or archives have existed their curators have been compiling information to assist in organising the collections that they house and making their contents accessible. We can look back thousands of years to see this in action: we may go, for instance, to the ancient city of Ur, whose princess, Ennigaldi-Nanna, compiled inventories of her private museum of antiquities on clay cylinders, or to the biographical registers of authors compiled by Kallimachos of Cyrene for works held in the Royal Library of Alexandria. We can trace from these distant times an almost unbroken line of developments in the ways in which this information has been compiled and the forms that it takes, until we reach the distant descendants of these ancient pioneers in such contemporary achievements as WorldCat, a union catalogue of 2.8 billion works in 18,000 libraries.

The term universally applied to this information, which supports, refers to or acts as an auxiliary to our collections, is metadata. This word, derived etymologically from both Greek and Latin, literally means ‘data about data’, and it is with this concise definition that it is usually introduced. Although metadata has been created for millennia, the term itself made its first appearance only in the late 1960s, when the computer scientist Phillip Bagley defined it as:

This concept rapidly became common parlance in computer science and even inspired an animated film, entitled Metadata, that was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1971 (Foldès 1971). It is now ubiquitous in information science to refer to the relationship between an item of data and the information by which it is described or referenced.

From information science to libraries

The concept of metadata translates very easily, by analogy, to the processes by which libraries and librarians have long been creating and employing information to assist in the discovery and management of their collections.