Metadata for the Masses

Abstract

This chapter seeks to demystify metadata for archaeologists who are responsible for producing and managing digital documentation, but who are not themselves trained in library and information science. It provides a general overview of the role and importance of metadata in contextualizing digital documents and ensuring possibilities for future reuse. Following this overview, common metadata standards such as the Dublin Core are introduced, along with some simple, relatively easy strategies to incorporate metadata into data structures for digital archaeological documentation. After a discussion of Linked Data principles and approaches, the chapter concludes with a brief explanation of ontologies, semantic representations of data, and serialization. Archaeologists producing or using digital data are encouraged to familiarize themselves with these concepts to enhance the discipline’s capacity to produce discoverable, well-described, and reusable digital records.