Metadata is the backbone of almost every area in life where there is a need for information organisation. Whether for work or in your personal life, the information we create and access relies on metadata.

The Future of Enriched, Linked, Open and Filtered Metadata, is a comprehensive and accessible guide to creating accurate, consistent, complete, user-centred and quality metadata that supports the user tasks of finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining and exploring information resources.

Based on his many years of academic research and work as a cataloguing and metadata librarian, Getaneh Alemu shows readers how they can configure, create, enhance and enrich metadata for print and digital resources.

Challenging existing principles, Alemu argues for the importance of user-centred metadata and the value of updating, correcting, cleaning, linking, sharing and reusing metadata. The Future of Enriched, Linked, Open and Filtered Metadata also discusses:

definitions, discussions, and comparisons among MARC, FRBR, LRM, RDA, Linked Data and BIBFRAME standards and models

discussion of the underlying principles and protocols of Linked Data vis-à-vis library metadata

practical metadata configuration, creation, management, and cases employing cutting edge LMS, discovery interfaces, formats and tools

discussion around why metadata needs to be enriched, linked, open and filtered to ensure the information resources described are discoverable and user friendly

consideration of metadata as a growing and continuously enhancing, customer-focused and user-driven practice where the aim is to support users to find and retrieve relevant resources for their research and learning.

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, Too Big to Know, and Everyday Chaos, said, “Getaneh Alemu has provided us with a valuable work about modern metadata standards that is made more than a reference volume by its willingness to discuss the arguments about each, and larger contexts – pragmatic, social, and philosophical – within which these arguments occur.”

The practical examples and beginner friendly language in this book makes it a suitable and informative read for those involved in metadata creation, management and utilisation as well as a reference for LIS students.

Getaneh Alemu is Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Solent University where he manages a team of cataloguers with responsibility for providing accurate and usable metadata for the university. As part of his work, he introduced innovative approaches to cataloguing including writing cataloguing workflows, RDA templates and normalisation rules. He holds a PhD from the University of Portsmouth where he developed a theory of metadata enriching and filtering using a grounded theory method. Getaneh is author of An Emergent Theory of Digital Library Metadata: Enrich then Filter (2015) and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles on metadata, digital libraries and Web 2.0 technologies.

This book will be available from the American Library Association in North America and Canada and from Taylor & Francis in Australia and New Zealand.