Metadata describing the content

Last updated on August 1st, 2024 at 11:30 am

To enable the processing and preservation of the archived contents, it is advisable that authors supply additional information about the contents (metadata).

Metadata is additional information that describes a content. It can be provided in web pages through meta tags that are interpreted by computers but are not visible to the human users. The meta tags are particularly useful for pages containing few text and should be:

inserted in the <head> section of a page’s source code;
descriptive and adequate to the content of each page;
kept up-to-date, specially in sites that frequently change.

Examples of metadata for this web page

Description: small text that summarizes the content of the page.

<meta name="description" content="Recommendations for authors on how to include metadata on web pages to enable preservation." />

Keywords: set of words or expressions representative of the main ideas presented in the page. These words should also be present in the text of the page.

<meta name="keywords" content="Recommendations for authors, Web page metadata, preservation" />

Dublin Core: it’s a simple metadata schema to describe digital objects, such as videos, images or pages on the Web. The Dublin Core schema is composed by 22 elements that can be used to describe, for instance, the subject, author or language of a content. There are free online tools that help generating Dublin Core metadata for a web page.

 <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" />
<meta name="DC.Title" content="Metadata describing the content" />
<meta name="DC.Subject" content="Recommendations for authors" />
<meta name="DC.Description" content="Recommendations for authors on how to include metadata in web pages to enable preservation" />
<meta name="DC.Type" content="Text" />
<meta name="DC.Creator" content="Daniel Gomes" />
<meta name="DC.Contributor" content="João Miranda, David Cruz, Ana Lucas" />
<meta name="DC.Publisher" content="Portuguese Web Archive, FCCN" />
<meta name="DC.Date.Created" content="2009-08-21" />
<meta name="DC.Date.Modified" content="2009-11-10" />
<meta name="DC.Language" content="EN" />
<meta name="DC.RightsHolder" content="FCCN" />
<meta name="DC.Format" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="DC.Identifier" scheme="DCTERMS.URI" 
 content="http://arquivo-web.fccn.pt/how-to-participate/recommendations-for-web-authors-to-enable-web/metadata-describing-the-content?set_language=en" />