Metadata is critical in digital humanities because, at its core, it is descriptive and contextual information about a digitized item that enables discovery (Martin & Neatrour, 2015). The field of digital humanities relies on the perpetuation of knowledge from the past; therefore, metadata serves as the lifeline for this process. Further, metadata is an essential means of organizing collections and connecting items across collections.
The rise of AI integration poses a threat to library infrastructure and discovery systems. The push for AI use in library systems, combined with budgetary constraints and the consolidation of library catalog vendors, threatens the accuracy and diversity of metadata (Olsen, 2025). Additionally, the removal of human labor experts threatens the accuracy and diversity of metadata, as humans make choices about what information to record.
Based on my experience with the “Digitizing Your Kitchen” assignment, describing items in Tropy and displaying them in Omeka was labor-intensive. I spent significant time ensuring that images were handled and labelled in accordance with the Library of Congress and Dublin Core standards, and that the metadata I entered into Tropy is publicly searchable. The templates and vocabularies developed by Tropy and Omeka, however, facilitated this process in terms of accuracy and time. Tropy allowed me to add detailed metadata to my digitized images and to group them in my project. Omeka, another tool used in this project, provided the digital platform for describing and exhibiting my project images. Through a complex, labor-intensive process, I organized and optimized my digitized kitchen objects to improve their searchability for other researchers.
Metadata matters in digital humanities, and decisions about metadata creation are best made by humans. The rise of AI in the digitization process threatens human labor, as AI leaders push to aggregate and monetize standardized metadata. Ultimately, the push to use AI in this process undermines the archival value of human curation.