Everything we need to know about metadata the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day When metadata became breaking news appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency many members of the public encountered this onceobscure term from information science for the first time Should people be reassured that the NSA was only collecting metadata about phone callsinformation about the caller the recipient the time the duration the locationand not recordings of the conversations themselves Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems In this book Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadataIn the era of ubiquitous computing metadata has become infrastructural like the electrical grid or the highway system We interact with it or generate it every day It is not Pomerantz tell us just data about data It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form For