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This presentation is intended to help you understand the broad issues surrounding metadata--what it is, how to create it, how you can use it--along with some general strategies and points of view that I have come to after working on this problem for the past seven years.
The classic definitions of metadata are often not particularly informative, partly because much that is called metadata could as easily be called data, but it is consulted rather than plotted. ESRI makes a helpful distinction between "properties"--information that the GIS knows about your data, and "documentation"--information that the GIS could not know, so you must provide.
Don't leave home without considering all three of these factors; tools alone can't create metadata, nor can trained people who haven't decided whose job it is to do which part. Yet in seven years, the community of metadata managers has created a great variety of useful tools, a large amount of helpful documentation, and has accumulated a lot of experience in dealing with the common staffing questions.
Like other scientific and technical information, metadata will be of high quality only if they are made available to the right people and are put to use. But uses are many, from in-house concerns ("what did my predecessor leave on the computer?") to products that people outside your organization will use. By providing a way to store changes to the data, metadata can play an important role in tracking revisions and assuring people that they have the right version for their needs.