Abstract
Metadata has a history as long as human civilisation. In this chapter, we trace its story from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century. We find metadata of increasing sophistication in the ancient cities of Ur, Ebla and Alexandria. The arrival of printing revolutionizes information and the metadata that is needed to handle it. The nineteenth century sees the codification of practices that still influence metadata, and also a great schism between libraries and archives that persists to this day. The twentieth century sees the advent of a radical new way of organizing knowledge, facetted classification, which has come into its own in today’s digital terrain.
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Gartner, R. (2016). Clay, Goats and Trees: Metadata Before the Byte. In: Metadata. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_2
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