Using art to talk and think about metadata: An experiment

Abstract

Metadata is not often seen as creative work. I think many metadata librarians, myself included, struggle to describe our work in a way that is meaningful and understandable to our colleagues. We can quantify it, and numbers are meaningful to administrators and budget-crunchers. But it’s difficult to imbue numbers with passion, significance, or true understanding of what metadata work supports in a library. If my colleagues don’t understand metadata work because it is not visible or obvious, I wanted to find a way to communicate about what I do visually, and I wanted to think differently about my approach to my work as well.