What is metadata for publication and how is it used? Part 1: Introduction to metadata

This text is based on a presentation by Katerina Bartzi1 during a workshop for scholarly journal editors. Check the presentation here
This text was reviewed by Katerina Bartzi and by the members of OPERAS’ Common Standards and FAIR Principles Special Interest Group2. A special thanks goes to Marina Angelaki and Milica Ševkušić.
Introduction: From analogue to digital systems
Nowadays, we are all familiar with metadata. We use it when we fill in the subject of an email or when we search for products online, yet this is not new.
Since ancient times, people have felt the need to sign their works to enable identification of such work and association with the proper creator.
Long ago, libraries organized their collections and sorted them on shelves. They created a card for each book where they wrote in a structured way the title, the author, and the subject of the book. They also wrote a code to indicate on which shelf to locate the book. Currently, libraries organize their collections in digital systems, and we, as users, browse their electronic catalogs to find a book.
In each case, metadata is used to describe, organize, and find a resource through a system. But how do we define metadata? Why does it increase the value of the data they describe? How does it help to ensure a resource is useful? We will try to answer to these questions in this post.

Defining metadata
There are various definitions of metadata. The prevailing one states that metadata is the data about other data. It is information in a structured format that contains data about the description and other characteristics of a resource and support functions associated with it.
The National Information Standards Organization (Riley, 2017) describes it as follows:
metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.
Jenn Riley
But what is a resource?
A resource is a work, expression, manifestation, or item. A resource can be a tangible item (e.g., a book, a newspaper, a reports, cartographic material, a painting, a sculpture, etc.) or an intangible entity (e.g., a website, a blog, computer files, software, etc.).
The term resource may refer to an individual entity (such as a book, a painting, or a film) and to the components of an entity (e.g., the chapters of a book, a photo in a newspaper, or a paper in an issue of a scholarly journal). The term also applies to the aggregation of some resources (like a book collection, a set of slides or an album of photos).
According to a Library and Information Science glossary,
Resource is a term used in the field of information organization to indicate an instance of recorded information (e.g., book, article, video, internet document, sound recording, electronic journal); resource is used in order to avoid using book, DVD, or other such specific designations; also called document, information resource, information package, library materials, or object.
How can metadata help us?
Metadata helps us describe, classify, manage resources with the same characteristics as type, subject, or author, and locate them. These seem to be the most obvious benefits, but they are not the only ones. Metadata helps us to achieve interoperability. In other words, data can be exchanged, interpreted, and presented across different systems in a way that it can be understood by humans and machines.
Data and resources are aggregated in online portals and aggregators. Thus, from a single interface, we can search and retrieve material from different catalogs. Resources and metadata are shared on social media, used, and reused. Reuse may serve educational, research, or other purposes. It creates new resources and new projects.
Metadata accompanies the resource with information about the terms of access and reuse and gives credit to the author.
Moreover, metadata holds information about changes that a resource has undergone, about technical issues, and contributes to its preservation and long-term use.
Metadata types
Metadata falls into three main categories. According to the information they contain, they can be descriptive, structural, or administrative.
Descriptive metadata
Descriptive metadata facilitates discovery and identification. It provides descriptive information about a resource, such as title, author, publisher, language, etc., and it physically describes a resource, informing dimensions, material, etc. It also gives identifiers. Descriptive metadata gives the appropriate information to help us understand whether we need or not this particular resource.
Structural metadata
Structural metadata describes the structure of the resource, its components, and their relation to each other. It helps us understand how a resource has been organized, if it is a component of a collection or an independent item, its place in a hierarchy, and its relation to other resources. This type of metadata shows, for instance, the relation between an issue and an article of a scholarly journal or between the different versions of a software. It facilitates the presentation of and the navigation through a resource.
Administrative metadata
Administrative metadata helps to manage, preserve, and use a resource. It includes:
- Technical metadata, e.g., file format, file size, modification date;
- Preservation metadata, i.e., information about preservation activities;
- Rights metadata refers to intellectual property rights associated with a resource, including the license, rights holder, access restrictions, and copyright date.
Conclusion
While the transition from analog to digital systems changed how we organize or search for resources, the concept of metadata remains a major one. This post, by presenting the definitions of metadata, its different types, and added value, highlights at the same time the importance of qualitative metadata in making a work findable, interoperable, usable, and reusable. High quality metadata is a key in paving the way for better analysis, new research, new products, and new data.
References
Riley, Jenn. 2017. Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata, and What is it For?: A Primer. NISO. https://www.niso.org/publications/understanding-metadata-2017
Glossary of Library Information Science. https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2015/04/glossary-of-library-information-science.html
Βασιλογαμβράκης, Ν., Λαγούδη Ε., Μπάρτζη, Κ., Παναγοπούλου, Αλ. “Μια προσέγγιση της καλλιτεχνικής παραγωγής βασισμένη στα δεδομένα : πως η τεκμηρίωση της καλλιτεχνικής παραγωγής των δημιουργών ωφελεί τους ίδιους, τις Σχολές Καλών Τεχνών και την κοινωνία” στο Διεθνές Συνέδριο Για μια Σχολή Εικαστικών Τεχνών του 21ου Αιώνα, Φλώρινα, 12 έως 14 Μαΐου 2017 https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12776/16489
Featured images:
“University of Michigan Library Card Catalog” by dfulmer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
“Herakles Olympos Louvre F30″by Jastrow (2007) is in the public domain.
- Katerina Bartzi is an Information scientist, working for the National Documentation Center, Greece, in open access content infrastructures and documentation services. She focuses on digital content strategy, data modeling and linking, terminology and metadata. [↩]
- The SIG “Common Standards and FAIR Principles” aims at exploring the workflows, mediums and technical standards that have recently emerged as a result of the changes brought about by the transition to Open Science. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Karla Avanço (January 19, 2023). What is metadata for publication and how is it used? Part 1: Introduction to metadata. The road to FAIR. Retrieved March 8, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/trrx