Metadata is a recurring theme in this blog, and rightly so–without metadata, you have no way of determining if the data set you wish to use is fit for your use. My Esri colleague Colin Childs wrote an essay that guides a person through the creation and management of metadata in ArcGIS Pro, here. Central to Colin’s guidelines is working through a project package that is part of the Learn ArcGIS lesson library. Tasks you work through here include changing the metadata style to the Federal Geographic Data Committee‘s (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Spatial Metadata (CSDGM). After adding the metadata elements to the data for a county in Mississippi, you explore the metadata for the data sources referenced by the map, including the all-important spatial reference.
After these activities, Colin encourages the reader to streamline these tasks by creating a metadata template. He says, “An organization-wide metadata template can include basic contact and distribution information and legal restrictions that apply to all items. An organizational template can be the basis for project-specific templates that include the purpose for which the project and its items were created, standard place names describing the geographic region in which the work takes place, and how the project’s deliverables will be distributed and maintained.”
Some of the metadata that you work with in this lesson.
I highly encourage you to read the article and go through this activity.
–Joseph Kerski
