Love Data 2026: Metadata and Documentation

Love Data: Metadata and Documentation was presented via Zoom on Tuesday, February 10th as part of Love Data Month 2026.Workshop Description: Many of your day-to-day activities rely on metadata, or “data about data”. From your phone to the library to Google and beyond, metadata, or structured information, is working hard behind the scenes. Metadata help you discover new resources, information, and ideas, draw connections between them, and then share what you’ve learned or created with others. Well-documented metadata also lets you preserve and manage your data and resources long into the future.Meanwhile, proper documentation is important to ensuring your work is understandable, reusable, and reproducible. Do you have a readme? Are you using the correct file types, following a file naming convention, and providing your methodology and data dictionaries? Well-produced documentation works together with metadata to ensure your data and resources are understandable for years to come.Join University of Rochester Libraries to learn more about the basics of metadata and documentation.Note: Due to bandwidth, captions have not been added to the recording yet. However, once captions have been added, the recording will be reuploaded.