Whats so new about metadata? Haven libraries been creating metadata for a long time?
No, metadata is not a new concept – to people working in libraries anyway, particularly those who do traditional “cataloging”, but It is now usually applied to digital collections (e.g., video, audio, image and data files) rather than the traditional physical collections (e.g., print, microformats, video tapes). It now refers not only to “bibliographic” or “discovery” data , but also data necessary for managing / housing / storing / inventorying / retrieving the data, and preserving it for future use.
