What is Metadata? - Document Metadata Overview

What is Metadata and why is it important?

Simply defined Metadata is data about data. Much like a catalogue card is needed to find books at the city library, Metadata is used to classify documents and ensures the document can be searched for and found quickly at a later date.

FileHold provides for a highly configurable system that provides flexibility for Administrators who wish to further define the information about their documents using centrally controlled Metadata / index values. While a document can be stored in a folder and then found via full-text search, this can be limiting when wanting to describe the status of a document, the type of document, the date the document is subject to review and other important information. When a system contains thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of documents, a full text search result from searching the contents of the document can bring back large results since many documents share common keywords and phrases. Finally, you may be storing images, graphics, TIFF scans, maps, schematics or other images that do not contain any information. Assigning metadata to these types can also make searching and retrieving dramatically faster and easier. We will now examine metadata and how FileHold provides for custom categorization and classification systems to allow users to quickly and easily define additional information.

Consider a Purchase Order Document. The metadata that can be used to describe this document could be Purchase Order Number, Purchase Order Amount, Customer Name and simple fact that the file is a Purchase order and not a different type of document like Invoice or Contract.

The Library administrator can easily create metadata classification standards on behalf of the entire company making it easier for system users to classify and search for documents. The Metadata to be collected can be quickly customized by document type depending on what information is important to be captured.

Metadata fields can be of various types including drop down menus, number fields, text or date fields, Yes/ No and currency fields to name a few.

Where appropriate, the same metadata fields may be used in more than one document type. In this example the customer name metadata field is associated with the Purchase Order, Contract and Bill of Lading documents types. This will allow users to search for all types of documents that relate to a given customer.

Metadata is captured when documents are added to the FileHold library and can be changed as new versions are introduced through FileHold version control. The metadata associated with documents is then used to drive searching and folder views.

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