Video & Audio Metadata Guidelines Working Group

NISO RP-41-2023, Video & Audio Metadata Guidelines, now Published!

The new Recommended Practice, NISO RP-41-2023, Video & Audio Metadata Guidelines, was approved February 10 and published February 13, 2023. 

Background Information

In today’s academic, research and professional information industry, video and audio are growing in popularity and volume and, with the rapid progress of streaming technology, in global reach. Libraries are seeing higher demand from their patrons, publishers are developing their media offerings, and software developers and other vendors are improving support for media assets in their products and systems. However, clear, mutually accepted recommendations do not exist for the academic, research and professional information community to consistently and precisely identify and describe media assets, similar to metadata standards that are in place for text-based materials such as journals and books. There do exist many types of metadata that can be applied to media assets, whether exclusively or not, but none encompass the full range of properties that would be needed to allow for extensive collaboration and interoperability between organizations and systems.

This Working Group plans to establish guidelines for metadata for video and audio assets, incorporating existing standards rather than creating new ones, and covering the following categories of properties: Administrative metadata; Semantic metadata; Technical metadata; Rights metadata; Accessibility metadata.