As I've begun to look at Diigo as a platform for curation, I have come to realize what a necessity detailed metadata (labels, tags, etc.) is. I have been looking into missionary work for the Church, both how full-time missionaries can use digital tools as proselyting tools, as well as how non-proselyting members can use similar tools to share their beliefs with their friends. The tag "missionary" brings up all sorts of craziness, and not much of it is useful. Trying to generally search for websites and research related to missionary work for the LDS church brings up hundreds of blogs of missionaries currently serving, or people ranting about how their missions were the best. I found that the pages that appeared most useful were ones who had quite a few tags, so that a variety of searches would pull up those pages. Until this point, I haven't worried much about putting labels and tags on my posts, yet as a result of the frustration I experienced trying to find information relevant to my research, I'm now recognizing that if you want your research, opinions, etc to be taken seriously, let alone seen, labels and other metadata are necessary. As mentioned in class, metadata also contributes to the identity you create online. If I want my work to be taken seriously, and if I want to be a person whose thoughts can be taken seriously, then the labels I assign need to reflect that. Overall, this process of curating has been an awakening to the magnificence of metadata!
One thing that I've realized is that knowing the right terms can mean a lot, too. I've recently found a couple of terms that opened up my research on a much broader scale, and if I had just gone on using the same tags and searches as before, I likely wouldn't have found a lot of the useful info that I've come across.
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