Metadata for the Information Multiverse

Abstract

In today's Information Multiverse there are pressing societal, ethical and educational, as well as intellectual reasons why, rather than simplifying and reducing or streamlining, we should actually be complexifying and increasing our efforts to generate metadata that identifies, collocates, contextualizes, authenticates and enfranchises. Such metadata should not only draw upon, but should also simultaneously incorporate rethinking of fundamental and long-established bibliographic and archival principles in light of the plural and increasingly post-physical nature of the Information Multiverse. Our ongoing research is modeling an Information Multiverse approach to metadata by identifying ways in which these complexified principles can be embedded in local, community and global (i.e., web) metadata infrastructures. Their underlying references to common concepts additionally open up the possibility of interoperability and re-use, and, outside the silos of professional/information fields, linking and navigation.

Ethical implications of digital infrastructures for pluralistic perspectives

“…In a bibliographic-archival system, referred to as "Archival Multiverse", it denotes "the plurality of evidentiary texts (records in multiple forms and cultural contexts), memory-keeping practices and institutions, bureaucratic and personal motivations, community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs" (Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) and Pluralizing the Archival Curriculum Group (PACG) 2011, p. 73). In Information Systems, it deals with the complexity, plurality, and increasingly postphysical nature of information flows (Gilliland and Willer 2014). Our better, as it tackles multicultural interactions and variances directly.…”