Two blog posts made me think today of the need to name things, even things that name things: Dan Chudnov's post on in-situ cataloging and Lorcan Dempsey's post on four sources of metadata.

Naming confers identity which makes a thing easier to relate to other things. This is especially important for libraries as we try to integrate our professional expertise with other resources in a networked environment. Dempsey's taxonomy of metadata sources helps us relate, rather than pit against, our professionally-created metadata to that of metadata contributed by users or determined programmatically by software agents. Chudnov's question about what to call description right on the UI where we see both the item being described and the metadata together can be helpful in re-contextualizing our "item-in-hand" and other cataloging principles and practices. [But I'll think more about these to come up with good names.]