Metadata as Knowledge

how metadata means.

The articles and reports in this issue focus on different forms of mediation and meaning in metadata and the protocols, context, and environments in which metadata interacts. Contemporary practice in cultural metadata creation is moving the conversation from metadata as an invisible mediator to considerations of how metadata creates and enforces meaning and ethical, inclusive, and just practice. Metadata creators and the systems and practices used must now contend with how metadata means.

Metadata, Hidden Knowledge, and Labour
The labour, and especially affective labour, involved in cataloguing work is invisible to those outside cataloguing and metadata departments. Belantara and Drabinski make the labour of cataloguing work visible as they explore the process of metadata creation as seen through the eyes of working cataloguers. Through recorded interviews, we see what decisions cataloguers face in describing material objects and the struggle between a cataloguer's ability to express content accurately and faithfully (and ethically) and translating this expression within the constraints of standards and controlled vocabularies. Exposing the often-fraught experience of using one's "cataloguer's judgement" also brings recognition to human involvement in metadata creation.

Standards vs. Expression
Standards used by metadata creators offer useful guidelines and allow data to be shared and to interact with other data. However, they also constrain, misrepresent, and amplify bias. Subject representation within metadata work has long been pointed to as a locus of inequity. Theorists and practitioners from Sandy Berman (1993) to Hope Olsen (2002) have made clear that subject and classification standards are rife with problems. However, even in the study of issues of representation, inequities are present in who is represented. Gooding points to the lack of attention on the Circum-Caribbean region, suggesting "very little academic work addresses the importance of decolonising and reconciling with collection materials pertaining to the Circum-Caribbean despite the cataclysmic colonisation that dominated the region for centuries." To address this issue, Gooding offers an in-depth analysis of how standardized vocabularies have failed in her study on the representation of the Circum-Caribbean region in the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
Naming within metadata systems is particularly powerful in demonstrating inequity, but there is also power in reclaiming, restoring, and reimagining metadata within systems of knowledge organization. Karim Tharani (2020, 221) states that "even with an unwavering conviction of librarians for social justice, the practicality of making library systems socially and cognitively just for marginalized knowledge materials remains daunting" but suggests that finding a middle ground for working within existing systems is an important and necessary corrective path. Berg, Bains, and Suri explore issues in trying to describe materials in the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. Their solution, a locally created thesaurus to support the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive, represents both a means of addressing the lack of appropriate headings and the trend toward greater openness to using domain-specific vocabularies and thesauri within metadata systems.

Knowledge Sharing and Reuse of Metadata
Metadata is a vital element of resource description but is increasingly utilized to support activities related to exchange, reuse, and remixing of data, including into new or alternate platforms and systems. However, such activities, even in the case of standardized metadata, represent a real challenge and expose the brittle and limited nature of standards, especially in relation to meaning and context. Börjesson, Sköld, Friberg, Löwenborg, Pálsson, and Huvila offer insight into attempts to understand, interpret, and make meaning from archaeological data. Their attempts to reuse existing data show the difficulties faced when there is a lack of standards or agreed-upon processes in a discipline. Canning, Brown, Roger, and Martin showcase the LINCS (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship) project's ambition to allow humanities researchers' linked open data (LOD) datasets to be machine-processable and interconnected. The authors use the project work to discuss the practical and conceptual challenges of traversing datasets from diverse perspectives within the humanities, making connections to the challenges of situated knowledges. Finally, Lieu and Campagnolo point to the difficulties in sharing information and knowledge related to conservation of cultural materials to be shared within an institution over time and between people and make the case for a linked data standard.

Forays into Open and Shared Knowledge
Wikidata, an open knowledge base hosted and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland, presents a new opportunity for libraries, archives, and other holders of metadata-related cultural materials both to push data out into the open web and to take advantage of the potential richness of such data through integration into other knowledge bases and platforms. This issue includes discussions and reports on the ways that traditionally created metadata mix with Wikidata as well as discussions of new services and opportunities integrating Wikidata into metadata workflows. Lemus-Rojas, Odell, Brys, and Ramirez Rojas discuss the opportunity Wikidata presents to provide new academic library services centred on the creation of scholarly profiles for faculty members and the opportunities provided in this process to address information inequities. Topham, Chambliss, Wigard, and Huff discuss the flow between traditional library metadata for a comics collection and knowledge in Wikidata and how each can inform, correct, clarify, and otherwise interact with the other. Lindsey, Kuriger Suiter, and Hanselman examine the interaction between the Program for Cooperative Cataloguing (PCC), linked data, and Wikidata through the lens of ethical contribution of gender information to these platforms.

Linked Data, Metadata Translation, and Discovery
Opening collections metadata through the use of linked data offers the advantage of greater access to collections of different kinds. However, traversing domain-specific practices in libraries and archives into more

Machine Learning, Knowledge Graphs, and Meaning
Contemporary linked data practices are rooted in earlier theories and practices of expert systems. Looking at the history and aims of such systems helps to plot the shift toward knowledge graphs and understand the potential implications for how metadata relates to knowledge. Provo explores the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and expert systems to look at the interaction between cultural heritage institutions and the Semantic Web. As GLAM institutions become more involved in open knowledge platforms, she suggests it is important to know this history-especially as it relates to the conceptualization of the encyclopaedia. Huck offers another view of the relationship between expert systems, AI, and linked data with an in-depth analysis of knowledge graphs as created and understood by metadata practitioners and a comparison to the mathematical ontology of philosopher Alain Badiou.

Conclusion
Throughout this issue, the authors have consistently demonstrated the richness and depth of metadata creation and consumption. Metadata's utility to aid search, discovery, retrieval, and interoperability means it is often neglected as textual in and of itself; its utilitarian nature obscures its tacit power. However, metadata's practical nature also gives this latent power excitement and vitality. Knowing the complexity, we still must bring it to bear in application: a decision must be made, things must be described, information must be shared. This special issue of KULA on "Metadata as Knowledge" ultimately shows how complex and powerful metadata is, how it functions as knowledge, and how open knowledge platforms create new opportunities for metadata to interact and flow as knowledge.