Chapter 5. Resource Description and Metadata

Robert J. Glushko
Kimra McPherson
Ryan Greenberg
Robyn Perry
Matthew Mayernik
Graham Freeman
Carl Lagoze

5.1. Introduction

This chapter is a turning point in the book. The earlier chapters have discussed the key ideas of the discipline of organizing: identifying and selecting the resources to organize, and then organizing and maintaining them and their organizing system. We have emphasized that finding things later is the most important reason for organizing them. This can be surprisingly hard to do. People know things by different names or remember different aspects of them.

The famous painting here by the 19th century American painter James Whistler is exhibited in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and has been described as a Victorian-era Mona Lisa. What name do you know it by? How should it be described?

Resource descriptions for art usually contain the name of the artist, the medium, the year of its completion, and, of course, its title. Most of these map fairly obviously to the properties they describe; the title, owing to its prominence and ...

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