What is metadata? Why is it so important? How does it work and what makes it difficult? Using a case study from my previous work as a museum & archives intern with the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia, I will use this presentation to try and answer these questions and more.

2. First of all…what is it?
• Well, there are different types: structural,
descriptive, & administrative
• Most users interface with the descriptive
kind – so let’s focus on that:
– It’s a kind of filter that we put over information
resources in order to summarize or extract information
& make them more usable
– “Data about data”

3. Put more simply:
•Books/Articles •Sound/Audiovisual
•Video/Film •and more…
Info-rich resources
Info-poor resources
•Photos
•Images
•Artifacts

4. Metadata & the Library
• A library’s job = helping patrons find information
– accurately & efficiently
• In order to do that, we have to predict the resources
we think users will want & make them discoverable
• The level of description matters!
– Rich, specific metadata = easy, accurate find 
– Sparse, general metadata = too many search results 
– No metadata = chaos!
• In sum, we need metadata!!!

5. The Analog Story:
• In some ways, assigning metadata was easier with card
catalogs because:
– There was a limit to how much stuff one repository could hold
– Had only a few metadata categories: corporate body, author(s),
subject matter
• More access points are possible with digital metadata control, which changes
the game a little bit

6. The Digital Story:
• Computers & the Internet forced us to make changes!
• The move to digital had lots of pros and cons
– Remember that card catalog index card? Some of the cons are still apparent today!
• What’s different now is the amount of space we have
online: it’s constantly expanding!
– Megabytes have become gigabytes, terabytes, and so on
– Cloud storage expounds upon that even further!
– That means millions of information resources – way too many to look through one
by one!
• This makes metadata a little bit trickier
– The same tricks don’t work with all that data
– We need richer ways to describe & search through everything

7. Metadata & Ethics
Case Study: Archiving in Bolivia

8. Gran Poder

11. Metadata & Ethics
• Controlled vocabularies & standards make
metadata really useful for patrons
• But - not all metadata schemas or cataloging
rules are language convertible
– How do you provide for multilingual audiences?
– How do you handle colloquial terms?
– What about Anglocentric vocabularies & rules?
• New standards make global metadata more
possible every year, but it’s still an obstacle

12. Collection Materials: Major Bolivian
Newspapers

13. Ethical Problems in Multilingual
Digital Records mgmt:
AACR2 (1904); Flexible XML
ISBD; FRBR metadata
structures with
room for
discussion of
IP/copyright
versus
??? Attempt to Dublin Core:
No national or standardize Newspapers of cultural
regionally declared cataloging in Central objects, artists, events,
cultural objects America (1949-50) ; and media –
standards – infamous for IP/Copyright of each
typically claim inconsistency in completely unknown
Anglo-American or following cataloging (as are laws regarding
European rules, lack of copyright)
equivalent librarian training, &
more

14. WDL…the multilingual solution?
Image cataloging currently
available in 7 separate languages

15. Search Engines vs. Catalogs
• Libraries = Discovery
– Collections have been hand-selected
– Data and bibliographies are attended to much more closely
– Better search results based on relevance
• Google = Search
– Using Google is taking a big gamble on the information
that results
• Google results are sorted by click-popularity
• A business run by Ad-words
• No controlled vocabulary or thesaurus
• Yikes!

16. Metadata & the Future
• Today’s information users are growing up with the Internet
& Google search
• People don’t learn how to use (or depend) on Boolean
search operators anymore
– Rather than force users to learn our ways, we’ll have to adopt what
makes sense to them
– OCR & the semantic web will become more & more relevant,
requiring extremely flexible but complex metadata structures
• Search & metadata [in tandem] will become richer – but
more time consuming to create
• We need to collaborate and prioritize what users need and
find valuable over time

17. in working with metadata…
• Collection management professionals need to
– select and craft careful metadata that can be the voice
for thousands of books, images, films, and artifacts
– Be flexible & learn about new metadata formats
– Pay attention to international & domestic cataloging
ethics
– Listen to users, patrons, and the community!

18. Any Questions?
• Please feel free to ask away!