Everything we need to know about metadata the usually invisible infrastructure for information
with which we interact every day. When metadata” became breaking news appearing in stories
about surveillance by the National Security Agency many members of the public encountered this
once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that
the NSA was only” collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller the
recipient the time the duration the location—and not recordings of the conversations
themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book Jeffrey
Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata. In the era of ubiquitous
computing metadata has become infrastructural like the electrical grid or the highway system.
We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not Pomerantz tell us just data about
data.” It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For
example the title the author and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does
its job well it fades into the background everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for
granted. Pomerantz explains what metadata is and why it exists. He distinguishes among
different types of metadata—descriptive administrative structural preservation and use—and
examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern
metadata possible and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book readers
will see metadata everywhere. Because Pomerantz warns us it's metadata's world and we are
just living in it.
