Cousera's Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information has  just wound up but if you are interested add this excellent course to your watch list for future sessions. The course, provided by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is eight weeks long and requires about 3-4 hours of study each week. 

About the Course

If you use nearly any digital technology, you make use of metadata. Use an ATM today? You interacted with metadata about your account. Searched for songs in iTunes or Spotify? You used metadata about those songs. We use and even create metadata constantly, but we rarely realize it. Metadata -- or data about data -- describes real and digital objects, so that those objects may be organized now and found later.

Metadata is a tool that enables the information age functions performed by humans as well as those performed by computers. Metadata is important to many fields, particularly Computer Science; but this course is not purely a Computer Science course. This course approaches Metadata from the perspective of Information Science, which is a broad interdisciplinary field that studies how people create and manage information.

Course Syllabus

• Unit 1: Organizing Information 
• Unit 2: Dublin Core 
• Unit 3: How to Build a Metadata Schema 
• Unit 4: Alphabet Soup: Metadata Schemas That You (Will) Know and Love 
• Unit 5: Metadata for the Web 
• Unit 6: Metadata for Networks 
• Unit 7: How to Create Metadata 
• Unit 8: How to Evaluate Metadata

Recommended Background

Knowledge of HTML or HTML5 is a prerequisite for this course. If you are unsure if you meet this prerequsite, we recommend that you score at least 15 out of 20 on the W3Schools’ HTML Quiz. If you find that you do not have this level of knowledge of HTML, many free online resources are available, including:

• W3Schools’ HTML Tutorial
• Codecademy’s Web Fundamentals Track