Stephen, Jay et al.,

Ah the joys of language!

Jay Heuman wrote:
>         You should not apologize for anything . . . people in different fields
> and subfields have different knowledge.

Absolutely!  And asking is the only way to educate yourself.
>
> > what the heck does interoperability mean and what on
> > earth is a metadata vocabulary?
>
>         "Interoperability" is just another way to say "compatibility."
>         Metadata vocabulary is just another way to say data sets (spreadsheets,
> databases, etc.).

Not exactly.  Metadata vocabulary is a standard, agreed upon set of
terms to describe data.  Huh?  For instance, your database of slides has
fields like "artist" and "title" while my database of slides has fields
which describe the same concepts, but I call them "maker" and "what they
done called it."  If we are using the same metadata vocabulary, we will
call the fields the same thing, and gosh, if our systems are
interoperable, maybe we could share the information easily.
>
> > If you are trying to create interest in the community
> > may I suggest you start first by using terms with
> > accepted/standard/(any) meaning?

That's funny, because that's the goal.  It is good to be reminded that
what have become accepted, standard terms to one person, may be jargon
to others.  And as Jay said, there are a whole bunch of people with
different areas of expertise who make up an institution, so educating
yourself about what they do, rather than brushing off their terminology
as made-up terms with no meaning, will probably make the entire
institution function more smoothly.

> > Recently I've also encountered such gems as post-genome
> > and post-global.Why must we learned folk try so hard to
> > verbalize ourselves into oblivion?
>
>         There is an oft-asked question.  The answer, quite simply, is
> self-preservation.  If everyone can understand everything, what good is
> an MA or PhD?

As one of my former professors said "any turkey can get a PhD." and if
you make up some really nifty terms with hyphens, parentheses, or
nonStandard capitalization, you just might impress someone.  However,
"interoperability" isn't quite the same as "post-genome" in terms of
elitism!

Oh, and as Jay pointed out, language changes.  English changes a lot:
think of all our new verbs, which were once perfectly nice nouns:
"office," "flipchart" (oh, wait, I hated that noun too...)

I suppose my point is this: sometimes words you don't understand are
jargon, and sometimes they are terms for something you know nothing
about.  I am a little alarmed by the way the business world and yes,
computers, have changed our amazing language, but change it will (unless
you want to be like the French and have an academy to establish a
standard vocabulary, metadata or no).

-Cate Cooney
Digital Projects Librarian

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