We are All Catalogers Now: Leveraging Do It Yourself Metadata for Research Collections

Today’s cultural heritage professionals face an embarrassment of riches and possibilities. Those possibilities are accompanied by new questions about collections and metadata. Content is being produced at the grassroots level, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year due to the portability and accessibility of digital recording devices and proliferation of content management sites. Events are not only captured in real time, but they are archived in real time. Personal recording devices and archiving methods are becoming more sophisticated, capturing metadata automatically. This paper will examine how organizations can harvest content to support their research missions. It will include examples, practical advice, and discussion of the long-term implications. This paper examines how socially produced content can be leveraged by libraries and research collections for historical benefit. Society produces the content, and we as librarians are positioned to preserve it and place it in cultural context for researchers to discover.