THIS IS NOT A ‘HOW TO DO IT’ BOOK. There are several excellent guides about the practical steps for creating and managing metadata. This book is intended as a tutorial on metadata and arose from my own need to find out more about how metadata worked and its uses. The original book came out at a time when there were very few guides of this type available. Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians provided a good starting point which introduced the basic concepts and identified some of the main standards that were then available (Caplan, 2003). It was an early publication from a period of tremendous development and in an area that was changing day to day. Introduction to Metadata, published by the Getty Institute, represented another milestone and provided more comprehensive background to metadata (Baca, 1998). It is now in its third edition (Baca, 2016).

In my work as an information management consultant many colleagues and clients kept asking the questions: ‘What is metadata?’, ‘How does it work?’, and ‘What's it for?’. The last of these questions particularly resonated with the analysis and review of information services. This led to the development of a view of metadata defined by its purposes or uses. Since the first edition of Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval there have been many excellent additions to the literature, notably Zeng and Qin's book, simply entitled Metadata, which is now in its second edition (Zeng and Qin, 2008; 2015; Haynes, 2004). I also enjoyed Philip Hider's book, Information Resource Description, which is substantially about metadata from a subject retrieval perspective (Hider, 2012). There are many other excellent tomes, some of which are mentioned in the main body of this book. I hope that this second edition adds a unique perspective to this burgeoning field.

This book covers the basic concepts of metadata and some of the models that are used for describing and handling it. The main purpose of this book is to reveal how metadata operates, from the perspective of the user and the manager. It is primarily concerned with data about document-based information content – in the broadest sense. Many of the examples will be for bibliographic materials such as books, e-journals and journal articles.