"boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs"

I have a great respect for my cataloging professor. At first I wasn't sure what I thought about him or his class, and even though I'm still deciding how I feel about the course content, I've decided about him.

It takes a very special person to make metadata schemas interesting (or even comprehensible) to people who don't actually care. Danny Joudrey is a very special person. How many people do you know who can lecture for three hours straight and still be excited about the topic even when most of their class is struggling to stay awake? His background in theater really shows through at this point. Frankly, I'm not sure why so many of my classmates have issues paying attention--the man is funny.

What really sets him apart, though, in my mind, and what has earned my respect is his vast knowledge on the subject. And not only does he have a deep resevoir of facts on metadata and the current state of inter-library debates over Dublin Core, MARC and XML, he can communicate all of this to us--essential laymen--in language that is understandable (well, most of the time). And he is clearly passionate about the topic, which will earn anyone points in my book. I am not quite ready to put him on a par with Bender, but he's getting pretty high up there on my list of people to admire (he's also almost mastered the names of everyone in class--and we're a big class--which is more than I can say for my own advisor, who I am also taking a class with this semester). Actually, if I were to compare him directly with anyone from USF, it would be Jeff Paul, who was our band director for only one year. I think they own the same enormous, grey, shapeless sweater.

All of this serves only as an introduction to a funny story about something he said in class yesterday. As you've no doubt guessed from the title of this post, it involved boobs. Well, not really. It's was actually about metadata, and why it doesn't work the way it should.

There is some background information you should all know in order to understand the context of the story. Our class discussion was on the Dublin Core metadata set, which is a simplified way to catalog electronic items for searching. The idea was that website creators would enter data into the 15 data elements (title, creator, description, etc.) and this metadata would be included in the code for the webpage, so that web searches could more effectively search for sites relating to search terms. Good idea, right? Only, people who create web pages don't seem to think like librarians and didn't see the point in spending time describing the sites they had just built. And occasionally, unscrupulous web developers would enter false data into the data elements, giving their site false hits with popular search terms. At this point, our professor thought it helpful to give an example:

"The data fields could just say, "boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs" and all the 12-year-old boys would go there." He then thought a moment, gave a short laugh and, turning slighly red, cupped his hand in his chin and continued. "Did I really just say 'boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs'? I don't even know that much about them."

I couldn't look at him for the next several minutes because I was trying very hard not to laugh out loud. My description cannot properly convey the humor of that moment, encapsulated not so much in what he said but in how he said it.

Who would have thought that cataloging could be do fun?

-Kim