Metadata Games

There's no question that metadata is around us wherever we go in the digital world. Whether it is the personal information that notes our virtual journey to a site, the administrative metadata embedded onto a webpage, or the descriptive metadata that tells us about a selected informational object, we are adrift in a sea of metadata. Now, it is even there for us when we're ready to unwind and do something fun, in the form of Metadata Games. The product of cooperative efforts from organizations including Dartmouth College's Tiltfactor Game Laboratory, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, Metadata Games provides aspiring metadata creators and taggers the opportunity to help construct real metadata descriptions for real digitally archived material in the form of several pieces of interactive software. By drawing on the elements of crowd-sourcing and mobile gaming, Metadata Games seeks to use the population-at-large to solve the problem of description-less digital collections. It is definitely an interesting idea, though questions about ensuring traditional descriptive practices such as specific-entry and controlled vocabulary certainly abound.