Although user created metadata, such as tags or social bookmarks, is perhaps the most visible aspect of resource description, metadata is created and maintained in various ways that do not involve users. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES, or simply the Dublin Core set of metadata elements) provides a small, basic set of 15 text elements through which most resources can be effectively described and organized for retrieval. The Dublin Core set is a child of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, an “international effort designed to foster consensus across disciplines for the discovery-oriented description of diverse resources in an electronic environment.” Gilliland describes the DCMES as a core set of concepts that “identifies a relatively small, generic set of metadata elements that can be used by any community, expert or nonexpert, to describe and search across a wide variety of information resources.” Essentially, these models represent a systematic means of formalizing descriptive practices, in order to enable cross-disciplinary use of information objects.
These concepts are central to the process of locating and retrieving information from databases. Data is retrieved from a database via the query process, and a central part of a query is the description of the data that the searcher wants to retrieve from the database. Metadata is part of the computing process that makes this possible. For this reason, metadata is important to library and information science professionals, because metadata is directly linked to retrieval of information.
