Definition of Types of Metadata

Descriptive metadata, also commonly known as "bibliographic data," describes the intellectual content of a document or other resource so as to facilitate the search, identification and collocation of information contained in the resource.

Administrative metadata provides a wide variety of information related to the display, use, management and interpretation of digital objects over a period of time. Some examples of administrative metadata may include:

rights management statements (aka "rights metadata");
information about the object's file characteristics or the capture or encoding processes used in creating the resource (aka "technical metadata"); and
information about the provenance of the digital resource and efforts to archive or manage the data for the long-term (aka "preservation metadata").

Structural metadata are those metadata that are relevant to presentation of the digital object to the user describing them in terms of navigation and use. Some examples of structural metadata would be data providing for a page-turning function, or data allowing linkage to encoded text, embedded image, audio or video files, or any other type of resource having its own structure of complex parts.