Natasha Hollenbach did a Surface Embroidery piece, “It’s Complicated” showing some of the ways that metadata is complicated. Each letter represents group of things (the organization property):
- M: The Five Types of Metadata (with the words Administrative, Descriptive, Technical, Structural, Preservation stitched inside)
- E: Searching (Boolean, Facets, Sorting, Keywords, And Or, Filters, Exact Phrase)
- T: Metadata Standards (BIBFRAME, Dublin Core, MARC, RDA, METS, EAD, MODS)
- A: User Interactions (Usable, Interface, Find, Online, Discoverable, Accessible)
- D: Current Trends (Crowdsourcing, Linked Data, Tags, CAD, OCR, HTR, Digital Humanities, API)
- A: Maintenance (Legacy Data, Updates, Clean-up, Migration, Fix, New Term)
- T: Controlled Vocabularies (TGM, TGN, LCNAF, MeSH, LCSH, NALT, CONA, AAT)
- A: Flexible/Consistent and Aggregate/Local (Flexible, Consistent, Focus, Details, Aggregate, Local) are the two big balances acts that we all perform with our metadata.”