A Comparative Study on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) Metadata in Websites of the Central Libraries of Iran’s Universities

Purpose: This research has been carried out to study the extent to which Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) metadata have been used in designing the websites of the central libraries of Iran’s universities.
Design/Methodology/Approach: A total of 66 homepages of the websites of the central libraries of Iran’s universities were studied in three groups i.e. Universities affiliated with the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology; Universities affiliated with the Ministry of Health and Medical Education; different branches of the Islamic Azad University. For this purpose, the browsers Internet Explorer and Netscape were used and the sources of web pages were reviewed and all the meta tags existing in the HTML format of the webpages were extracted and entered in the prepared checklist. Then, by using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage and average) the data collected were analyzed.
Findings: This research shows that all the reviewed websites have benefited from general HTML metadata; however, the extent of using metadata has been trivial in some cases. Considering the extent to which central library websites have used these meta tags, medical science universities have the first rank in terms of average use (43%). Branches of the Islamic Azad University have the second rank with an average use of 31% and universities affiliated to the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology have the third rank with an average use of 28%.
Conclusion: The present study shows that the most widely applied meta tag elements are, title, content-type, keywords, link and description. This is justifiable because most web designers have applied these general meta tags, considering their familiarity with these general metadata rather than specific metadata standards like the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.