I think around 12 IAs have had to manage our metadata system at one time or another.
One was not bothered by it, had no problems with the work. One other person found it satisfying and actually interesting. Everyone else seems to have found it limiting, frustrating, boring, degrading even. In the admittedly limited frame of IA, wireframes are sexier.
Maybe I’m odd but it was a task I found flow in. There was a rich repository of data to analyse, procedures that could be honed to perfection and theory that could be drawn upon. There were side benefits of learning new words (ungulates?) and watching the English language evolve (house-blinging?). It felt like a craft.
Now few of my colleagues were interested in what I was doing day-to-day but that had the benefit of no-one else meddling with it. So my success or failure on any given day was down to me. There’s a certain pleasure in that.
I also, to a reasonable extent, built my career on it. My first presentations and published articles were all formed by insights from being immersed in the metadata systems. Other people were working in the same space but for the most part they weren’t the same people who were standing up at conferences and talking.
So find it boring, by all means. But there’s opportunities there for the taking.
silver | 13-Jun-08 at 2:18 pm | Permalink
I found you comment about flow interesting. One of the conditions essential for experiencing flow is feedback.
The frustrations I experienced with the system was the lack of feedback we got from it.
Shoveling in terms with no sense of improving the experience or utility for the end users. If i had been convinced that a difference was being made I think it would have a made a difference to my experience of the role.
admin | 13-Jun-08 at 2:41 pm | Permalink
In the early days the focus was very much on ensuring it was an easy to use system for the journalists…so I guess the feedback from meeting them and talking to them.
Translating the metadata into benefits for the true end-users was also going to be the challenge (but challenge is definitely part of flow) and you seem to have got us closest to that point(!)
The other component of flow that seems significant is “A sense of personal control over the situation or activity”. I knew, as one of the creators, I had to decide what to do with the system and what direction to take it in. If it wasn’t achieving the goals then it was my job to fix that.
Michelle | 15-Jun-08 at 10:06 am | Permalink
I like how managing metadata feels like playing with words.
I’ve just taken on the huge project of starting to formulate an enterprise taxonomy for my company. Do you have any favourite resources for reading up on taxonomy theory? My experience with metadata has been pretty informal up to this point and this is the first taxonomy I’ll be creating from scratch.