# Exporting Metadata

This is important for [p2p sharing](p2p-sharing.md) and possibly backing up your library metadata. Metadata includes everything the user curated in regards to their library:

- rating
- tags
- names
- authors
- ...

One needs to define a format for exporting this metadata. I can think of the following requirements:

- readable by computer (to import and share with p2p)
- being able to only export a part for p2p
  - a complete set of metadata might be too large

It will probably boil down to `xml` or `json`. I would choose `json` since that is easier to write and parse with Node.js.

Maybe the [JSON:API](https://jsonapi.org/) schema lends itself to the p2p application. For backing up locally it seems to be overkill. The local metadata backup might as well be just the database file.
