4M: Monday Morning Metadata Movies (& Muffins!)

Posted by laura on March 25, 2011 under Metadata | Read the First Comment

When I was a newbie manager I experimented with more regular staff meetings for the people in the Metadata Services Group.  I wanted to incorporate shared learning and group discussion into our meetings to make training more fun and relevant.  So I added metadata videos to our Monday morning agenda.  I would bring homemade vegan muffins to encourage attendance and participation since we met early and it was Monday after all (pix available via Flickr!).  We called it the 4M: Monday morning metadata movies & muffins.  You can pronounce that Mmmm.

We eventually abandoned that experiment.  Folks liked the videos, but wanted to watch them on their own time.  Since then, my periodic sharing of links for metadata-related videos with the folks on my team has dwindled. I was reminded of this practice when a dear friend recently asked me for the links to the videos.  I was also reminded of this when Mod Librarian started posting a Metadata Monday  series on her blog.  Great minds and all that.  I’ve finally managed to post the link to the YouTube play list for the late-lamented (at least by me) experiment.  Drum roll please…for your viewing pleasure:

The  4M: Monday Morning Metadata Movies play list.

Caveat: the  movies we watched were not always strictly about metadata, but they were on topics relevant to metadata management within academic libraries. They were  intended for an audience of paraprofessionals & professionals.  And sometimes they were more fun than educational.

Some past 4M videos which weren’t on the YouTube play list:

• Does metadata matter? – by Andy Powell from Eduserve
• Science Commons Scholar’s Copyright Project
• Openness for Life Science Databases
• Basic HTML tutorial

I’m inspired now to resume my quest for videos relevant to metadata workers in academic libraries.  Perhaps I’ll even post them each Monday.  Or at least on some Mondays.  And I don’t promise to bake vegan muffins on Sunday nights.