About the Metadata on Our Site
On this page you can learn about metadata, why it's important, and how we work with metadata on Curationist.org.
What is Metadata?
Although it may sound technical, metadata is simply information about an artifact or artwork. It could be an item's title, the name of the person who made it, the date it was created, or what it's made of. This descriptive information enables you to find all the works by a particular artist, or all the pictures of cats on our site. In most cases, this metadata comes directly from the institution where the object is held, like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Art Institute of Chicago. For select items, the Curationist team enhances the metadata, adding more information or providing a different perspective, which is often rooted in a concern for social justice.
Why is Metadata Important?
Although it may appear to be “just facts,” metadata is not neutral. It has traditionally reflected Western, Eurocentric, white supremacist values and worldviews. By providing more inclusive and respectful metadata, Curationist both makes items easier to find and expands and diversifies the ways we access and understand cultural heritage.
Read more about how metadata supports social justice in these selections from our series, “Metadata Learning & Unlearning":
Metadata Beyond the Eurocentric: Recovering Digital Cultural Memory- Words Matter: Reconciling Museum Metadata with Wikidata
- Invisible Labor and Inclusive Metadata
How does Curationist decide what additional metadata is needed?
In many cases, the Curationist team adds metadata that facilitates and improves searching. As in the examples below, they may add a different date format or supply missing metadata.
However, they also add metadata that reflects more up-to-date language or provides a social justice perspective. For example, in the metadata for this portrait of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Curationist team added information about her ethnicity and race, which was not included in the metadata from the contributing institution.
Subject
The Curationist team does their own research to ensure that the metadata they add is accurate, well researched, and respectful of the people, objects, and cultures it describes. Item by item, they help make cultural heritage more accessible and open to all.
How will I know where the metadata comes from?
When you see this symbol ( 
) next to a piece of metadata, you'll know it was created by a Curationist team member. In some cases, you may see two versions of the metadata, one from Curationist and one from the contributing institution:
Date
In this example, the top date is Curationist supplied, ensuring that this item will come up in searches for 5th century BCE. The bottom one is the date supplied by the contributing institution, which may not come up in a search for 5th century BCE or a search for 475 BCE.
The Curationist team uses the suffix “BCE” (meaning “Before the Common Era”) instead of “BC” (which means “Before Christ”) to acknowledge that all cultures do not mark time in relation to the Christian calendar.
In other cases, you may only see a Curationist piece of metadata:
Cultural Context
In this example, the Curationist team added information about the cultural context of an item. The metadata from the contributing institution did not include this information.
If you do not see the Curationist logo next to a piece of metadata, it came directly from the contributing institution.
Does Curationist change or erase metadata?
Curationist never erases or changes metadata. All metadata from the contributing institution appears as it was received. (Although due to technical differences, it may not appear exactly as it does on that institutions website!) Contributions from the Curationist team are always additions, not replacements to the metadata supplied by the institution.
However, Curationist sometimes receives duplicate metadata—two pieces of metadata about the same item that say the same thing—from the contributing institution. In these cases, Curationist may suppress one of the duplicates to avoid confusion. In other cases, Curationist receives date data that is formatted for computers but is not easy for people to read. When that happens, Curationist reformats the date to make it easier to understand. For example, the date “1641-01-01T00:00:00.000Z” is reformatted to “1641.”
What if there's no metadata?
If there is no metadata available from either the contributing institution or Curationist, you will see two dashes “--”:
Technique
These dashes are an opportunity for you to participate in making cultural heritage more accessible and accurate! If you have information about the item in question, please get in touch with us! We're happy to make appropriate additions suggested by our readers.
Which items receive enhanced metadata?
The Curationist team enhances the metadata for artifacts and artworks associated with our Editorial Features and Curated Collections. As we grow, we hope to expand our metadata efforts to impact even more objects in the collections.
How do Curationist archivists decide what terminology to use?
While our longer object descriptions can be a paragraph of text or more, when Curationist team members add single terms like “African Americans or Cat, they use terms from the Curationist Taxonomy. These terms are selected and vetted by the Curationist team to make sure they are up to date and respectful of the peoples and cultures they describe. All terms in the Curationist Taxonomy are associated with terms in Wikidata. For more information on how Curationist uses Wikidata, please see the Curationist Taxonomy Guidelines .
What if I want to see the metadata on the contributing institution’s site?
To see the metadata as it appears on the contributing institution's website, just click on the name of the institution that appears under the Source heading on the item page. For example:
Source
The name of the source institution appears as Curationist supplied metadata because Curationist adds the name and link to the item's metadata.
Why isn’t the metadata appearing where I think it should?
Curationist brings together items from a wide variety of institutions who all provide their metadata in different ways. Although we do our best to make sure that each piece of metadata appears in its proper place, we don't always get it right. If you see a piece of metadata that's in the wrong place, please let us know!
What if the metadata is wrong?
If you think a piece of Curationist supplied metadata is incorrect,
please let us know! We are always happy to discuss how to best describe and represent the items on our site.
If you think a piece of metadata from a contributing institution is incorrect, unfortunately we cannot change it, but we would be happy to consider appropriate additions as Curationist supplied metadata.
please get in touch!