happiness in managing metadata?
I think around 12 IAs have had to manage our metadata system at one time or another.
One was not bothered by it, had no problems with the work. One other person found it satisfying and actually interesting. Everyone else seems to have found it limiting, frustrating, boring, degrading even. In the admittedly limited frame of IA, wireframes are sexier.
Maybe I’m odd but it was a task I found flow in. There was a rich repository of data to analyse, procedures that could be honed to perfection and theory that could be drawn upon. There were side benefits of learning new words (ungulates?) and watching the English language evolve (house-blinging?). It felt like a craft.
Now few of my colleagues were interested in what I was doing day-to-day but that had the benefit of no-one else meddling with it. So my success or failure on any given day was down to me. There’s a certain pleasure in that.
I also, to a reasonable extent, built my career on it. My first presentations and published articles were all formed by insights from being immersed in the metadata systems. Other people were working in the same space but for the most part they weren’t the same people who were standing up at conferences and talking.
So find it boring, by all means. But there’s opportunities there for the taking.