Angelina Spotts, Metadata Specialist, writes on The Information Environment blog about how she explains metadata to the non-metadata world.
For the few years that I’ve been working with metadata, I’ve had to answer that question that most librarians who don’t work with reference and books dread, “What do you do?” I do admit that at times, I’ve used the trite phrase, “data about data” knowing full well it went a bit deeper than just that. In recent times, I have begun to improve my explanation to them by being more whimsical in my answer thereby avoiding that stress or frustration that comes with explaining this work to people who probably would not understand no matter how much explaining you did in technical terms. Nowadays, I just sing the following song to them...
Click through to The Information Environment to view see the song!