Metadata best practices and guidelines function as an essential mechanism for metadata planning, application and management, and interoperability. There has been a rapidly growing body of digital repositories and collections; accordingly, a wide range of digital projects and initiatives have adopted various metadata standards. Because of differences in the formats and knowledge domains of the resources, it is inevitable that these digital projects and initiatives may have different needs regarding metadata. Therefore, when a metadata standard is adopted in various institutions and organizations, it may have to be modified to reflect the community needs and characteristics of given resources. The flexibility and complex structure of natural language allow for the representation of a concept in various ways. Thus, common understanding and definitions of terms in a given metadata standard is essential for quality metadata generation, management, interoperability and resource sharing. This opens up a pressing need for a systematic examination of documentation practices, an area that up to now has been relatively unexplored. This book begins to fill the research gap through an empirical assessment of metadata guidelines and best practices. This is a book published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Metadata.

New Directions in Information Organization, co-edited by Dr. Jung-ran Park and Dr. Lynne Howarth seeks to provide an overview and understanding of the future directions, leading edge theories and models for research and practice in information organization. New information standards and digital library technologies are being developed at a rapid pace as diverse communities of practice seek new ways to organize massive quantities of digital resources. Today's digital information explosion creates an increased demand for new perspectives, methods and tools for research and practice in information organization. This new direction in information organization is even more critical owing to changing user needs and expectations in conjunction with the collaborative and decentralized nature of bibliographic control. The general aim of this book is to present the current state of the digital information revolution with the associated opportunities and challenges to information organization. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, it presents broad, holist and more integrated perspective on the nature of information organization and examines new direction in information organization research and thinking. The book highlights the need to understand information organization and the Web 2.0 in the context of the rapidly changing information world and provides an overview of key trends and further research.