[MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: Do you see metadata work as creative? ANN KARDOS: So I think yes. Yeah, metadata work is creative. One of the things that I'm interested in general in my life is the relationship between creativity and innovation. I think also creativity lends me a lack of fear of failure, because creativity has nothing to do with success and just has everything to do with the journey to get to the end product. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK, Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, The Research Library Rock and Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens and returning guest host, Sonia Slutskaya. Good to have you back in the studio. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Yeah, always nice to be back. CHARLIE BENNETT: Each week on Lost in the Stacks we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: This episode is called "Unseen Labor," which is a way to describe a lot of library work, but it is also the name of an international library community organizing embroidery project that was created in the summer of 2021. FRED RASCOE: Embroidery? So this isn't going to be one of those shows about librarian stereotypes, is it, where we all wear cardigans, and we all love cats, and we knit all the time? MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, no. Absolutely not. Fred, you know us better than that. Today we're going to talk about how librarians use creativity to express how they feel about their labor. CHARLIE BENNETT: And it is unseen labor, though some folks may think it's just magic. MARLEE GIVENS: We are joined by Ann Kardos, a metadata librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who created and curated the project, which is now both a book and a traveling exhibition. FRED RASCOE: I can't wait to hear about it. Our songs today are about the folks who do crafting with needle and thread, being seen, and library magic. We start with a song about the wonder of seeing familiar things in a new way, thanks to the almost magical power of description. This is "The Slider" by T. Rex, right here on Lost in the Stacks. CHARLIE BENNETT: Nice. [MUSIC - T. REX, "THE SLIDER"] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "The Slider" by T. Rex. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today we're talking to Ann Kardos, who is both a metadata librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the creator of the Unseen Labor project. We began our conversation by asking Ann about her work as a librarian and as an artist. ANN KARDOS: I am a metadata librarian at University of Massachusetts Amherst. That's my day job. It is kind of interesting, because when I meet people, I don't often talk about being a librarian. And I think part of that is because I work in metadata, and when you meet people who are not librarians, they don't really know what that means. But the other part of that is that my background is actually in film writing and production and art history. And when I became a librarian I worked in museums, and I was doing more like rent-a-book cataloging and archives and special collections. And I am an artist first and foremost, and I think I just fell into metadata work. Right now I'm working predominantly in fiber arts, doing embroidery and cross stitch. But in the past, like I said, I did film production and writing as my undergraduate degree at Syracuse University. It was called television, radio, and film at the time, so it's a little bit of an outdated name now. And some of my early work career was I worked for small documentary film companies. But I've also done photography, oil painting, but these days I'm pretty much just focusing on cross-stitch and embroidery, because it's small. So it's accomplishable. I can work on something pretty discrete and finish it in a relatively short amount of time, versus an oil painting or a quilt, which take a very long time. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Let's talk about the project. How did you come up with that idea? ANN KARDOS: I kind of fell into the idea. I had cross-stitched when I was a small child, and I don't think I liked it. I grew up in the 80s. My mom gave me a lot of these miniature kits with things like kittens and yarn balls. And I am not knocking anyone who wants to cross-stitch kittens and yarn balls, or Santa Clauses, or things like that, but it is not what I wanted to do. And I didn't really enjoy it. My mom would set it up for me. It is also kind of funny that I ended up in metadata, because I am not a stickler for rules. I'm much more experimental. But my mom is a stickler for rules, so I had to stitch so many. I had to stitch in the exact color of the pattern. So I actually gave up cross stitch. Probably by the time I was 12, I was done with it. But when the pandemic happened, like everyone else, so much of my outward life was gone. I wasn't leaving my house, and I didn't know what to do in my spare time at home. And I have a very good friend who is a seamstress that designs her own clothes, and sews, and cross-stitches, and embroiders. And she told me that I should cross-stitch. And she pointed me towards subversive cross stitch, so it was like-- it had a swear word in the pattern, and it was about staying home. And my friend told me-- she pointed me to this pattern and said, you might like this. You can get a-- stab fabric, get your rage out. So I did. I bought the pattern. I bought everything I needed for it, and I just started stitching. And something about cross-stitch, when you're following a pattern, it is very meditative. So same thing, maybe people get this from crossword puzzles, or jigsaw puzzles, or things like that. So it was something that it's repetitive. I could do it for a while. I could kind of get into it. And so I actually started stitching a lot and realized I liked it a lot, either when I designed my own work or when I was stitching swear words. Because the early days of the pandemic, I mean, that's kind of how I felt. During all of this I joined an online crafting group, and it was, again, just on a whim. It's not something I would normally do. I'm not really good at small talk, so I don't really enjoy meeting strangers. But this group met on Zoom. I found them online. I started stitching with them. And it was an international group of people all over the world, and it was started by an artist. And she has a swear word in her name, so I won't. And so she had started this community, and it was just really great to meet with other-- it's predominantly women, but we were from all over the world. And people were talking about their work, and themselves as people, and all going through this moment of crisis together. It was really good bonding, and I realized that I'd kind of lost that in my librarian community, because I was no longer going to the office, there were no conferences. Metadata is very inwardly focused work. And even when I am at work on my campus, if I'm physically in my office, I'm kind of doing my own thing. I don't necessarily work very intimately with a lot of my colleagues right there on my campus. UMass Amherst is part of the Five College consortium. I'm more likely to work with one of my metadata colleagues on one of those other college campuses near me in the consortium than I am with the person who sits next to me. But we were so disconnected. And I kind of started putting out feelers to find out if I had other librarians that I knew, or librarians that other people knew, to find out if people cross-stitched or embroidered. Marlee, you said you crochet, and I feel like when you go to conferences or anything, you always see tons of librarians crocheting and knitting. And there's just such a big community of knitters, but I am not a knitter, and I had never seen anyone stitching at a conference. So I just kind of started reaching out to people. And I was talking to a different colleague who was not in metadata at all, and she is also very artistic and creative. And I said that I really wanted to try to get together this group of colleagues for a stitching circle. And she was kind of like, well, let me know what you come up with. And I said, well, what if I could get enough people to have an exhibit? And what if it was about metadata? I wonder if we could talk? Like, this is so weird, and it just kind of like spiraled. But as you're stitching, you're-- just kind of like the patterns of cross-stitch and embroidery are like metadata. It made me think a lot about there are lots of things in our lives that have embedded metadata in them that we don't think of as metadata. But those cross-stitch patterns are a series of Xs that you have to learn how to read. The Xs correspond to colors. They correspond to certain patterns and shapes. And because I'm a creative person, that's what I automatically thought of, was metadata and the metadata of stitching. So that's kind of like where the idea came from, which was a very bizarre idea. So I decided to just give it a try, and I threw a kind of half-baked idea out onto a couple of listservs and said, hey, this is what I'm thinking of. These are some prompts. Does anybody stitch? And if you do, stitch contact me. I'd love to put an exhibit together of what we do. MARLEE GIVENS: Ah, listservs. Is there anything they can't do? CHARLIE BENNETT: We'll be back with more from Ann Kardos and the Unseen Labor project after a music set. MARLEE GIVENS: File this set under HB701.P78. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC - JAN AND DEAN, "LITTLE OLD LADY FROM PASADENA"] CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard-- OK, let's see if we can do this-- the "Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association" by Jan and Dean. And before that, "Embroidery" by Casey Dienel. Those are songs about folks who are not your stereotypical crafters. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks, and we are talking to Ann Kardos, the creator and curator of "Unseen Labor," an exhibit of embroidery and cross-stitch works created by metadata professionals about the often hidden and sometimes magical work that they do for the library. The exhibit catalog is available as a book, which we thought was just an e-book until we spoke to Ann. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: I want to ask you this. Since it's a radio show, and unfortunately our listeners can't see the pieces, can you describe some of the pieces, or maybe your own pieces? How did you-- did you choose them? Did you design them for the book? ANN KARDOS: Yeah, I did a mix. Actually, I brought the book with me so I could remember things. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: So there is also a real book book, not just the online book? ANN KARDOS: It's the same, but I printed it out through lulu.com, so I'll show you guys since you can see it. So I did print out a physical copy to give as a gift to my library, of course. But that was actually one of the decisions early on when people started to join the projects. People kept asking me if I want to show my colleagues and we don't have access to an e-book, what if I want to put something on my shelf? And so that was actually one of the determining factors in the platform that I used for the e-book, was that a colleague of mine suggested doing a pressbook book instead of just like an online image gallery for the exhibit so that it could be downloaded and printed as a book if people wanted a physical copy. One of my earliest pieces was just what I consider a public service announcement, and it was just like-- for me it was just kind of like getting thoughts out on a page. And so I just did a piece in a script cursive lettering. It was a cross-stitch piece. And it just says, "metadata is a public service." And I was thinking of that-- this was before I was a librarian, but I mean, in cataloguer circles you always hear of-- there was that campaign at ALA where it was like, cataloging is a public service. And there were buttons given out at old ALAs, I guess, and some of my colleagues still have those buttons. And I don't think metadata is actually different than cataloging at all, because cataloging is just the bits of metadata that we work with, like the data that's put in a cataloging record. And so I just wanted to kind of update that saying and also just give it as a reminder to colleagues. Because I think sometimes colleagues and people who use the library on the front end don't actually realize that there's data behind what they're looking at. And they don't think of metadata as a public service, because they see it as something with distance between me and the patron. But I fully think that metadata is a public service, because if I don't do my job well, that's when everyone knows that I exist, and that's when everyone gets really upset about what's in the catalog. And so that was one of my first pieces. Another piece I made I did not design, but I had found an image on dmc.com, which is a company that makes embroidery floss, and has embroidery and cross-stitch patterns and kits, and all this kind of stuff. And it is of an ostrich wearing a bowler hat riding a unicycle while juggling, and I thought it was really perfect. So I kind of took that image, and years ago I had found-- we had found something in our stacks. It was an old Rand paper, which were these scientific papers written-- white papers written by people who worked at the Rand Corporation. And the title of this paper written in 1968 was called, "Optimum Maintenance with Incomplete Information." And when I saw the ostrich juggling on a unicycle, I'd actually made a photocopy of that Rand paper, the "Optimum Maintenance with Incomplete Information." And I had photocopied it, and it was hanging in my cubicle for two years. And whenever people would come to my cubicle and point at that and ask me what it was, I would say, this is my job. So I thought the ostrich was a really perfect way for me to immortalize that title, so I wrote it in script kind of around the ostrich. And the title of that piece is called, "This Is My Job," because I think it's just the most perfect way to visually express metadata work. I feel like a lot of times people come to us, and they just say, I can't find this thing in the catalog. But we get no other information, and we may not have any idea why-- we don't know how they searched for it. We don't know if there really is a problem. Or maybe there's not a problem. And if there is a problem, there could be multiple problems. Because if it's a data issue, it could be multiple pieces of data affecting something in our discovery layer. So that's my favorite piece that I stitched for the exhibit. MARLEE GIVENS: That's really great, and I feel like it's part of a theme of the book. Some of the pieces seem to be about the work. I mean, the piece, the exhibit, and the book are called "Unseen Labor," and it's really about the labor and the work that you do. But what are some other themes that you felt were expressed in people's creativity? ANN KARDOS: It was really interesting, because some people took it really literally and some people took it a little more creatively, which I think is actually what makes us cataloguers, because we have people who are very literal cataloguer and then people who are a little bit more-- who come at cataloging from a different space. And it was just really interesting, because there were a lot of themes that came out of it. And I would say for the most part, I had-- I think there were about 35 people who submitted contributions. I was initially contacted by around 80 people who were interested in the project. Almost 100% of the people who contacted me were complete strangers to me, and many of them were complete strangers to each other, which is, I think, one of the most wonderful things that ended up happening with the project. And people who had never met would stitch very similar things about how they felt about their job. So there was a magic theme. I got several pieces that were about magic. One said, "Union of Metadata Magicians," and it had the double dagger from our cataloging records instead of a question mark. So it was a little bit of cataloging humor, a little bit of magic. And her take on that was that she said, her quote was, "I've always joked that the work in technical services is what people figure magic elves do for the library. Even our coworkers don't really understand what we do. They say, do your magic and fix the problem." Another-- actually a colleague of mine at UMass, who is not a metadata librarian but manages our institutional repository, her piece was called "Mysteries of Discoverability," and it's a hand with a lot of lightning bolts and stars and all this stuff coming out of it. And at the bottom she wrote, "Keywords Are Magic, and I'm the Magician." And she talks about getting submissions to the IR and that she tells people, you need to give me some metadata. You need to give me some keywords so that people can find your piece in the repository. And that inevitably she'll get things that have no information, or very minimal metadata. And that she fills it all out, and she will put in a bunch of descriptive metadata for them. And when they get their monthly readership stats, they're thrilled, and they think she did something magic to make their piece show up in the IR. So magic was a big one. There were a few about technology. So like, Lynn Gates from Colorado, she did an incredibly involved piece called "From Chaos to Order." She made kind of like a quilted piece hanging from a rod, and it shows three blocks of a house, a computer, and library stacks. And her piece is so intricate, it's really hard to describe. But she shows rays of thread going through another piece that she's-- another little bit that she stitched on there that's a computer screen. And she shows all the bits of thread going through that and going to the different parts, showing that we take you on your couch and your computer and our books, and it all gets funneled through our computers, our brains. We make chaos into order so that you can find what you want. MARLEE GIVENS: It's true. Metadata is magic. FRED RASCOE: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more from Ann Kardos and the "Unseen Labor" project on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] LISA FUCHS: Hey, y'all, this is Dr. Lisa Fuchs from the Georgia Aquarium. I am the director of research and conservation, also in charge of feeding for all the animals, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks, WREK Atlanta. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode is called "Unseen Labor," a project created and curated by our guest, Ann Kardos, a metadata librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Metadata work, with all of its standards, policies, and practices, seems to most outsiders, if they think about it at all, as dry, rigid, and impenetrable work. But Ann invites us to expand our thinking. As she says in the opening chapter of the exhibition catalog, "Some of us feel unseen or misunderstood. Some of us feel like we want to show you something cool we've been working on. Some of us want to tell you a story about someone or something important. We all want you to think about the labor that we put into each resource you check out of the library, physical and digital alike. We want you to remember the people behind the scenes who make the discovery of resources possible. But we also want you to think about library metadata and resources a bit more colorfully and creatively, like we do." File this set under GV1558.J34. [MUSIC - THE PRIMITIVES, "THE OSTRICH"] OK, I want everybody to settle down now. We got something new we're going to show you, man. It's going to knock you dead when you come upside your head. You gettin' ready? [MUSIC - FOX, "THE JUGGLER"] FRED RASCOE: You just heard "The Juggler" by Fox. And before that, "The Ostrich" by The Primitives, featuring a primitive pre-fame Lou Reed. Those are songs about cool things you might find on an embroidery inspired by metadata librarians. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Today's episode is called "Unseen Labor," a stitching project created and curated by Ann Kardos, a metadata librarian and artist. You can see the pieces in an online exhibit catalog published as an open access book by UMass Amherst Libraries. In the last part of our interview, we asked Ann to tell us more about the exhibit and where it might travel to next. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: I have one more question about the book. There are some of the piece, the collaborations-- you have a piece, you have a few pieces with other people. And so tell us a little bit more about how those collaborations happened. ANN KARDOS: The collaborations for the most part happened because people contacted me and said, I stitch, but I don't have an idea. If someone else has an idea, or if there's some way that I can help, I would love to help out. So one collaboration is by Tina Gross and Gretchen Neidhart, and they have never met. Tina's in Minnesota, and Gretchen is in Chicago. Gretchen was like, I just don't have any ideas. I'm not sure how to do this. If someone has an idea, I'm happy to stitch it. And Tina Gross was actually following the project but did not know how to stitch and did not think she could train herself in time. And so she and Tina collaborated on a piece. I ended up also collaborating with a woman named Ruth Elder in Alabama who contacted me and said, I'm a really great stitcher, but I'm not really great at designing, so how can I help you? And it was funny, because I had a bunch of just like-- they were really rudimentary ideas, just words, just phrases. But I had so much work to do to put the exhibit together physically and to like-- it was also arranging stitch-ups so that we could all get together in groups, and stitch together, and talk about professional development activities, and get to know each other, and all this kind of stuff that I didn't have time to stitch things. So Ruth was like, oh, just scan, just scan me what you have. And I just sent her a bunch of scans, and she really identified with them and so decided she would stitch my stuff. But she kind of turned it into her own thing, which is really great. MARLEE GIVENS: So I think I want to talk a little bit about the exhibit to kind of move into our third segment. So you've been referencing the book, the book that came out as an e-book and that you've printed out as a physical book. But the pieces themselves were actually exhibited this past spring. So where are they now? ANN KARDOS: They are in a couple of cardboard boxes, because they're about to go be exhibited somewhere else, which is really exciting. So since I did end up getting enough people participating, I was able to go through with an exhibit at my own institution. I have forged a really close relationship with the liaisons in our science and engineering library, and they have a really casual exhibit space. So there's a public computer area, and they did a little campaign for themselves to kind of beautify their space a little bit a few years ago. So there's a librarian there who at the time was still managing the exhibit space. So it's really just some places, a couple of walls with a hanging system. And they have a couple of exhibit cases as well, so they were really amenable to showing the pieces there. It was on display from the end of January through the beginning of May. It was really great to see it all up on the walls. And actually several contributors were able to come see it, from even as far away as North Carolina and Wisconsin, which was really exciting. So I got to meet a few of the people in person. I think one of the most interesting things from the exhibit, though, is the students who paid attention to it. I got several emails from students who just saw it on the walls, and then saw my name, and emailed me, and told me that they learned something about metadata. I ended up doing an informational interview with a student who has decided he would like to do library metadata as a career. So he is exploring going to library school now, which is really great. And then that came down in the middle of May, and I had interest from some of the schools where other collaborators were, that their schools were willing to host it as well. So it is next to going to Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. Heather Pretty is the librarian who stitched a piece for the project, and her university was thrilled with the project. They contacted me. They told me that they take folk art really seriously. I was blown away by this, because I will admit that until that moment, I hadn't really thought of it that way. I just thought of this as a professional development thing I was doing, lacking connection during the pandemic, and that this was just something that came out of a group of people stitching together. But they were like, you've created an incredible piece of art, a work of art, and we want to have it up here in Newfoundland. So it's boxed up right now. I am about to probably at the end of the month ship it off to Newfoundland. And their exhibit will be live and open in person from September to December. MARLEE GIVENS: So how has the project reframed your own thinking about the work that you do, whether that's metadata or arts, crafts? ANN KARDOS: I think-- and again this is my own experience, but I heard kind of similar messages from some of the people who contributed pieces-- I think that metadata work in general, cataloging and metadata, is pretty solitary work. We don't-- we're very production-focused. We've got to get the resources out to the shelves, and we've got to get them into a condition where they're searchable and usable. But you know particularly in my work, I'm not working with someone else to catalog the thing in my hand, or to massage a file of electronic resources, or something. I'm just at my desk doing it myself. And then during the pandemic a lot of us were just-- we were still-- our work was still solitary, but then we weren't even in an office talking to anybody to bounce ideas off of or anything. And for me, I think the way I-- because we're so solitary, I think like, I feel like we reinvent the wheel a lot. If we're having a problem, you're like, oh, I can't get this thing into my system. We tend to try to work to solve it, I think, at our own computer. And the reality is, I could reach out to a colleague in Georgia, and maybe you've experienced it, and maybe you can give me some tips on what you've done, even if we don't have the same system. And so what I heard from bringing the community together, from just starting this community, is that it made people think about how shared and common our work really is and how we really should not just focus on yes, we all share records in WorldCat or whatnot, but really actually talk about how our work is really very shared. And not just at conferences-- not just have that experience at conferences, but actually try to be more collaborative in our daily work. And I think that's what a lot of people got out of it, and that's what I'm hoping to take forward. MARLEE GIVENS: I think that's a great sentiment to end on. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: I mean, your project is so fascinating. It's just wonderful, you know. It makes people feel warm inside, looking at those stitches and reading about collaborations and about metadata, so thank you. ANN KARDOS: You're welcome. It was a surprise. I really thought it was going to be me and two people, stitching in a lonely Zoom room together. [LAUGHTER] MARLEE GIVENS: You've been listening to our interview with Ann Kardos, metadata librarian at University of Massachusetts Amherst and curator of the "Unseen Labor" stitching project and exhibit, which invites us all to examine the creative, collaborative, and, dare we say it, magical possibilities of metadata work. CHARLIE BENNETT: File this set under N7433.3 M384. [MUSIC - DEVOTCHKA, "TRANSLITERATOR"] MARLEE GIVENS: That was "Transliterator" by DeVotchKa, a song about underestimating something because you just didn't notice how important it was. [MUSIC - DEVOTCHKA, "TRANSLITERATOR"] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's episode of Lost in the Stacks is called "Unseen Labor," which, as we said at the top of the show, is a way to think about a lot of library work. We all do things that go unrecognized and maybe we feel are not appreciated enough. What work do you all do-- and I'm talking to the show team now-- that you might like to see made into a cross-stitch and hung on the wall where you work? I'm going to let our guest host speak first. SONYA SLUTSKAYA: Well, I don't know. You know, I do the metadata, and I guess predictably. So what I would like to see cross-stitched is something that's impossible to describe, because that's what we usually do. And then once you describe it, everybody understands what it is. MARLEE GIVENS: You may be underestimating her level of understanding. CHARLIE BENNETT: That was a serious zen kind of description of a cross-stitch right there. MARLEE GIVENS: It really was, yeah, yeah. So I think I would probably have something to do with just organizing via the calendar, or project management type organizing, all of the preparing agendas for meetings ahead of time, and writing up notes, and those kinds of things. I feel like they're very important, but they go underappreciated. So I'd probably have something like a scribe working at a desk with a candle, or something like that. What about you, Charlie? CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I think I have to go with the waveform. When I edit this show together, I see waveform after waveform after waveform, these beautiful shapes that look like mountain ranges being reflected in lakes. And I go in, and I destroy them by highlighting them, and deleting them, and moving things around. And so I'd like a cross-stitch of the middle of that process, when there's a bunch of tracks, and a bunch of different voices, and I'm trying to make it all work together. Fred knows what I'm talking about. FRED RASCOE: I do. I can picture it. It looks great. I think I would pick-- well, I've been at Georgia Tech about 10 years now, and I think for that entire time I've never been more than an arm's length from a cup of coffee. So coffee does a lot of the unseen labor for me personally with anything that I do and any endeavor that I take on, so I'd like to represent that in cross-stitch or embroidery. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well let me grab a cup of coffee, and let's roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show was edited and assembled by Fred, part of the unseen labor of putting this show together. Thank you, Fred. FRED RASCOE: Yep, Charlie and I are going to work on our waveform cross-stitches. Legal counsel and a real live ostrich juggling on a unicycle were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: I do not know where we're going to put that thing. Special thanks to Ann for joining us today, to Sonya for being our guest host once more, and thanks as always to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is a rerun, and we'll be back with an archive-centric episode the week after. FRED RASCOE: It's time for our last song today, and as our guest confirmed for us, metadata librarians are indeed magic. But it's only magic because most of us don't see the hard work these librarians put in to make information accessible to you and I. So for all the metadata librarians out there, from here to Xanadu, this is "Magic" by Olivia Newton-John, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. CHARLIE BENNETT: What is happening? FRED RASCOE: Xanadu! [MUSIC - OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN, "MAGIC"]