Metadata Guideline Information
These Guidelines are intended to provide assistance across a range of sectors, so they are written in general terms. They are designed to aid web managers in the public, academic and private sectors who wish to add metadata to the pages on their sites. They may also be used to describe other resources such as digitized versions of pictures or objects that have been created by libraries, museums, galleries and other institutions.
Exactly what is Metadata and why is it Important?
Metadata is information in a structured format which describes a resource. A resource may be a publication such as a report or journal, a web page about a particular topic or service, or a digital object such as an image. Good quality metadata improves the efficiency of searching, making it much easier to find something specific and relevant. This contrasts with the general indexing employed by major Internet search engines where a search can often retrieve thousands of results, many of which are irrelevant. Metadata can be embedded within a resource,
i.e. included "in-line" as part of the HTML code. It may also be created and stored separately from the resource in a metadata repository or datastore (similar to a library catalogue). This catalogue system is general stored within the css.
The Role of these Guidelines
These Guidelines are intended to assist with the creation of quality, consistent descriptive metadata for online resources, aimed to improve resource discovery services for these web documents. There are a number of different metadata schemes in use. These Guidelines supplement existing metadata practice, and DO NOT give details of the complete element sets for these schemes, the syntax required for coding the elements, or the element qualifiers and value components that may be used. If not using a specific scheme, it is strongly recommended to consult the
Kingdom Webminister. If using a specific application scheme, such as a Locator Service (LS), consultation for the requried informaiton related to that specific scheme should be done. The Guidelines are intended to provide advice on determining the content for the West Kingdom metadata elements which are most useful for resource discovery. The elements addressed are
TITLE,
CREATOR,
SUBJECT,
DESCRIPTION,
PUBLISHER,
DATE,
IDENTIFIER and
COVERAGE.
Recommended Resource Discovery Elements
Complete as many resource discovery elements as possible, as all these fields are useful for both discovery and display. The more elements completed, the greater the opportunity for internet systems to utilize the metadata in various ways.
Note: specific application schemes will have their own requirements about which elements must be used and which are optional. All tags are repeatable. In general for multiple entries, use repeated tags rather than putting them all in one tag. Multi-lingual sites require multiple sets of tags, bascially one set for each language used on the site.