 Hello, I'm Dr. V Lehmann with Boston College Libraries, and today I'm going to talk to you briefly about the issue of metadata creation and research. One of a librarian and archivist's main job is to make the books, the journal articles, the letters, the manuscripts that researchers want to explore actually discoverable. Discoverable is simply the process in which you, as a researcher, can look for and find, can discover different types of documents related to your project. Librarians and archivists use metadata to make those documents findable. Metadata is simply the data about your data. It's a meta level. Here, for example, we have a book edited by multiple people, including Kimberly Williams' criminal job, called Seeing Race Again, Countering Color Blindness Across the Disciplines. Based off of this record, however, unless you know the specific words associated with this title or simply are looking for works by Crenshaw, Harris, Ho-sung, or Lipsitz, this is not necessarily going to be a book that's easy to find. What happens then is that metadata specialists take the book and actually sign additional words. Here's the record for that same book in our Boston College Libraries catalog. I'm going down from the title and creator information. To then see that I have points like subject, description, and summary, as well as that title, etc. Your subjects and summary act as additional keywords to assist you in finding what you might be looking for. Based on the title, for example, you would not necessarily know that this book has a significant amount about education in it, that it's about multicultural education as well as higher education. You definitely would already be finding it for race, but you might not be finding that it based on the title, that this is a text about the supposed post-racialism in the United States and engages with that very problematic discussion in some very interesting ways. Added to that the summary, each of these words in that summary effectively become keywords for you to search. If you were then to go to our library catalog and do an advanced search for these words or phrases, so social justice, white supremacy, etc. Then we get that same book, despite the fact that those phrases are not actually in the title or among the creator names. Subjects go a step beyond that. It's not just that they're searchable in a catalog like Boston College Libraries. It's also that they link you to other texts on the same kind of issues. If for example you want a discussion of race discrimination in the United States, I can click on that subject heading and our catalog will tell me about 357 other texts that discuss the concept of racial discrimination in the United States. Subject headings are supposed to be the core topics a text engages. The catch here is that you have to know these words and terms to find the material you're looking for. You have to know the established phrases. It's called a controlled vocabulary, where you have a vocabulary used to find things that is limited with the idea that more people will be able to find issues on the same topic because we're all using the same language. There are multiple challenges to using a controlled vocabulary, however, including that you as researchers have to learn it in order to make use of it. Our controlled vocabulary at Boston College and most academic institutions across the United States are run by the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress established their call numbers and their subject headings. That's how we organize our entire library with those A's, D's, etc. History for example is D through F's. These were designed at a point where it was all white elite men discussing how we should organize our entire body of information in the United States. They have very specific views about how the world should be organized, including that history was mostly about western history. It was mostly about the histories of the Americas, as you can see here with E and F. All of the world is then shoved into D, and within D you get entire subsections for Great Britain, but then all of Asia shoved into Ds, and they by Asia actually also mean the Middle East. So you get a hierarchy of knowledge in an effort to organize and make information discoverable. Added to that, you have this issue of the invisible neutral. But the neutral that sort of supposedly universal normal for centuries in the United States has been the white elite male. So in library classification, you have this issue of when the person discussed is not stated, it's assumed to be a white elite male. You also have this issue on the table of identifying authorship as a point of contention. I, for example, am a queer academic, but there's nowhere in the catalog wrapper that would indicate that in any way. Furthermore, I'm going to use this book as an example of really bad cataloging. You look at the subjects in the description and it generally doesn't actually tell you what the book is about almost at all. This kind of thing happens in part because most catalogers, the people who create the metadata, are so overworked that they have to get through multiple books in a day and don't actually have the time to consider the book in full and carefully. The point of all of this is to consider how research works. If you understand how cataloging, how metadata creation functions, then you can better understand how to find information as well. So think about how these things are described, how this affects you, because this also influences archives and archival description for findings, etc. What is and isn't discoverable is a lot about how society is organized and considers itself. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.