Trustworthy Metadata in the Age of AI: Foundations and Practice

Description

Description: In response to critical practitioner concerns about professional deskilling, training ownership, and the risk of catalogers becoming mere proofreaders for chatbots, this course is designed to transform metadata professionals from cautious observers into active knowledge engineers. Specifically, participants will learn how to move flat, disconnected legacy records out of siloed databases into open, connected knowledge graphs. Since automated systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce fluent but inaccurate, hallucinated, or inconsistent metadata, a technical validation layer is essential to enforce semantic accountability. Traditional cataloging skills, such as authority control, classification, controlled vocabulary, and data curation, are exactly the competencies needed to make AI-assisted metadata functional and equitable. This course provides an overview of the workshops in this metadata and AI course series. Josh Falconer (Lead Data Taxonomist & Ontologist, The New York Times) Mona Lehtinen (National Library of Finland) Myung-Ja (M.J.) Han (Berthold Family Professor, UIUC)