The center of my work in libraries is metadata. Metadata, or structured statements about resources, allows people to find, discover, access, and use the rich and varied collections managed by the River Campus Libraries. Beyond the library, I want to help the wider community learn how they can create and leverage metadata themselves. This can be as complex as a metadata schema for the output of a research lab or how we think about and describe faculty members, to something as straightforward as file naming conventions or an abstract for an article.
You can learn more about metadata, what it is, and why it matters to you, here. This includes some of my favorite metadata resources and one of the presentations on metadata I contributed to RCL’s Love Data Week.
The current focus of my time at RCL is helping the wider University community become more aware of and engaged with metadata, particularly where it can help them tackle their problems and improve their work. In 2020, we launched a new service, Metadata Outreach. Metadata Outreach leverages our proficiency in solving information-based problems to empower our community to recognize and tackle their information-based or metadata-based challenges. Metadata Outreach relies on the rich experience and expertise held by RCL’s Metadata Services staff, particularly in information organization, metadata schema, and controlled vocabularies, to support teaching, learning, and research activities at the University of Rochester. You can learn more about our specific service offerings and review examples of the projects we’re working on as part of Metadata Outreach here.
If you want to learn more about my experience developing and launching this new service, you can check out the book chapter I wrote:
Dull, M.E. (2021). Expand Your Reach, Empower Your Community: Implementing a Metadata Outreach Service Program. In K.A. Edwards & T. Mackenzie (Eds.), Telling the Technical Services Story: Communicating Value. (pp. 181-196). ALA Editions.
