ABSTRACT
Traditional media libraries have been organized similarly to traditional libraries of printed books and other materials: items on shelves. The library and archives communities decades ago developed their own standards for cataloging the content of every type worldwide, including audiovisual content. The big difference between traditional libraries and archives and those in many media organizations was that the media libraries were many times not as well documented and organized. The ability to include descriptive data, termed "metadata" because it is data about the essence being carried, opened up a wide range of functions only dreamed of in the linear media-based era. Groups of files that are related to each other can be described and tied together using metadata: data that describes an essence. Other types of metadata that are just starting to become familiar to those in the audiovisual community are checksums and external metadata such as quality control reports. Cataloging metadata has been standardized in various ways.
