Why metadata standards matter?

This paper, presented as a keynote at the IFLA 2025 Congress in Astana, Kazakhstan, provides an overview of the importance of metadata standards in today's information environments. It discusses key metadata principles such as the Universal Bibliographic Control principles, CILIP’s Metadata Guidelines for Cataloguing Ethics, and standards like IFLA-LRM, RDA and BIBFRAME. These frameworks are crucial for organising, discovering, and managing information resources. Metadata standards facilitate international collaboration, ensuring accuracy and consistency while enabling interoperability across various systems, platforms, and knowledge environments. They support bibliographic control and enhance user tasks, such as the ability to find, identify, select, obtain and explore information resources. Moreover, they help shape the logical structure of bibliographic data. However, these standards must also adapt to a landscape increasingly defined by enriched, linked, open and machine-actionable metadata. The analysis highlights both the strengths and limitations of current models, emphasising the need for metadata that is ethically grounded, transparently governed and capable of functioning effectively within AI-driven ecosystems. In conclusion, this paper asserts that robust metadata principles, standards and models are crucial for achieving both semantic and syntactic interoperability. They are also vital for fostering equity, trust, resilience and the sustainable development of future-ready information infrastructures.