There’s been much buzz among librarians, and others, on recent articles by Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley School of Information) on the “Train Wreck” state of Metadata in Google Book Search (See article references below). Nunberg certainly makes some good points. But we librarians are far from perfection in the metadata realm — Look at the good ol’ Card Catalog — Problems abound, as described in an amusing YouTube piece by librarian Brian Mathews (@brianmathews). He uses Georgia Tech as an example, but the same sorts of problems exist in many catalogs. It’s especially appropriate, in light of Nunberg’s emphasis of date problems in GBS, that one of the examples highlighted by Mathews (below) is author dates … Born by the metadata, die by the metadata …

Context: Recent articles by Geoff Nunberg:
Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck, Language Log blog
Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumseytemp