“Pirates of Metadata: The True Adventures…of a Harrowing Metadata Mining Project”

This work originally appeared in “Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication” edited by Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley. Chicago, IL: Association of College & Research Libraries, 2013. Any use of this work must be accompanied by this notification.

Citation

Ball, Cheryl E. (2013). Pirates of metadata: The true adventures of how one journal editor and fifteen undergraduate publishing majors survived a harrowing metadata-mining project. In Stephanie Davis-Kahl & Merinda Kaye Hensley (Eds.), Common ground at the nexus of information literacy and scholarly communication (pp. 93-111). Chicago, IL: Association of College & Research Libraries.

Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss the use of metadata in digital publishing as both a necessary means for creating accessible and sustainable scholar- ship and a method of promoting information literacy in students. To make this point, I argue that information literacy extends beyond technical competence and into a critical understanding of the contexts and ecologies in which information is created and used. That is, while understanding metadata, as a concept, is a functional part of information literacy, understanding the role metadata plays in information communication, such as scholarly publishing, requires far more rhetorical and critical understanding, which enhances information literacy practices. The study that showcases this practice centers on a digital publishing class during which I asked undergraduates to mine metadata from an open access scholarly journal that publishes exclusively hypertextual and multimedia scholarship.

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