On 4 April 2024, Dr. Grant Campbell (FIMS, Western) gave a guest talk entitled “Linked Data and the Metadata Tradition: Turning the Library Catalogue Inside Out” in Dr. Rubin’s Winter 2024 Thesaurus Construction and Metadata Course. It was a fascinating conversation and much needed and appreciated in the context of the ever-changing information profession!

Abstract: The library-centric metadata tradition has always focused on the “Document” paradigm: we use established metadata to describe the attributes of the resource in our collection. In that sense, our metadata lives “inside” the document and reaches out to other entities to which the document is related.  But linked data is forcing us to re-envision metadata as something that happens, not within resources but between resources. In so doing, it is forcing us to make a lot of implicit relationships explicit, creating an environment that feels a bit like a Hall of Mirrors.