We have just published our completely updated advice documents on metadata.

Photo by Fabrizio Sciami on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons licence

Metadata is essentially structured textual information that describes something about the creation, content or context of an individual file or collection of many digital files.

If you have a collection of digital resources – images, video or audio files – you and the users of those files will need metadata to describe, organise and find them.

There are eight documents in all – if you are new to metadata, we would recommend starting with An Introduction to Metadata.

• An Introduction to Metadata
• Metadata and Digital Images
• Metadata and Audio Resources
• Metadata and Digital Video
• Metadata Standards and Interoperability
• Putting Things in Order: a Directory of Metadata Schemas and Related Standards
• Controlling your Language: a Directory of Metadata Vocabularies
• Approaches to Describing Images