I’ll be honest and state up front that this week’s readings about metadata made my head spin which was a bit of a worry given my group project is going to be on Linked Open Data! However, reading through classmates’ posts and then going back to the readings I began to slowly appreciate the all encompassing nature of metadata in terms of knowledge organization. And yet to better understand the concept of metadata, it is best broken down into bite /byte sized parts such as types and standards. I really liked Diana’s use of alliteration and the “Three As”: access, authenticity, and administration.” as key concepts of metadata. Thinking along these lines and coupled with the Chowdhury’s “Metadata: why?” section I came to appreciate the purposes of metadata not simply as yet more information to go in a catalog record, but the creation of a particular type of record, one that is going to help any entity (human or computer) find a resource – be it a material or electronic resource; uniquely identify a resource from all other resources; and, enable this information about a recourse to be transformed to any future technology used for storing such information. It is this capacity, to be on going, to transform and adapt to new technologies that make metadata so vital in our information age. In this latter respect I found the diagram of the Information System in the Gilliland piece to be most helpful.