Descriptive Metadata for Television is a comprehensive introduction for television professionals that need to understand metadata's purpose and technology. This easy-to-read book translates obscure technical to hands-on language understandable by real people.

Metadata is data about data, or information known about the image in order to provide access to the image. It can be as simple as the subject of an e-mail, but as new technologies emerge and the media world continues to globalize it is getting more and more complex. Metadata is key to today's IT-centric television production environment and this is the first book approaching the subject end to end, from shooting the footage to archiving to consumer set top box.

The FIAF Moving Image Cataloguing Manual is the result of many years of labor and collaboration with numerous professionals in the moving image field. It addresses the changes in information technology that we've seen over the past two decades, and aligns with modern cataloguing and metadata standards and concepts such as FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), EN 15907, and RDA (Resource Description and Access). The manual is designed to be compatible with a variety of data structures, and provides charts, decision trees, examples, and other tools to help experts and non-experts alike in performing real-world cataloguing of moving image collections.