Getting comfortable with metadata reuse Jenn Riley Head, Carolina Digital Library and Archives University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

We want our metadata to be useful. So we can’t stop our efforts at discovery systems we run. And formats we define. 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 2

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 3 David Weinberger. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books, People make their own connections It’s impossible to predict (and provide metadata for) them all Knowledge isn’t fixed

“The solution to the overabundance of information is more information.” 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 4 “Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information… Knowledge—its content and its organization— is becoming a social act.” Weinberger, p. 133, p. 13

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 5 First order organization Second order organization Third order organization Weinberger’s framework arranging things – constrained by physicality for us, the shelves surrogate for the physical thing, with a few additional expert provided access points for us, MARC records, EAD finding aids all connections between things that anyone can imagine for us, the web, Linked Data, users, and connections to other data sources

Linked Data is an opportunity for us to promote third-order engagement with special collections metadata. 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 6

But what about context? 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 7

“Guide to the Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers International Union Printed Ephemera Collection,” NYU Tamiment Library & Rober F. Wagner Labor Archives. RDF/Turtle data generated from EAD courtesy of Corey Harper, NYU Libraries. 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 8 EAD: context through Linked Data

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 9 That’s a start. But what if we then… Started the process of creating links to other things? Promoted discovery interfaces that take advantage of multiple contexts? Feed what we learn back into our second-order metadata practices? Moved to native Semantic Web technologies? Provided full text, usage data, information on our processes…?

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 10 Provenance is one of many possible contexts. Allow users to create their own.

But what about authority? Quality? Control? 6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 11

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 12 Weinberger, p. 22 “Second order organization…is often as much about authority as about making things easier to find.”

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 13 It’s time to let go. The benefits outweigh the risks. Let the users evaluate the source of information, decide what’s relevant and appropriate to them. We never had that much control in the first place.

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 14 “Third order practices…are the Trojan horse of the information age. As we all get used to them, third-order practices undermine some of our most deeply ingrained ways of thinking about the world and our knowledge of it.” We must respond by rethinking our practices. Quote from Weinberger, p. 22

6/25/13 RBMS 2013: Metadata, The Reboot 15 And now to Aaron and Matthew for some more exploration of how to do this. These presentation slides: on Twitter