2026 ALISE Annual Conference

Metadata literacy has received far less attention than information, data, or AI literacy; partly because well-designed metadata works as invisible infrastructure. Yet LLM-mediated discovery makes this invisibility newly consequential: chatbots interpret queries and generate responses while the schemas, vocabularies, and exclusions shaping their outputs recede further from view. Through two vignettes, book recommendation and computational humanities research, we argue that library education should cultivate metadata literacy as an epistemic competence for the LLM era.