In 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott recorded a few seconds of someone singing “Au clair de la lune.”
He used a device called the phonautograph — a machine that etched sound waves onto soot-blackened paper. For more than a century, no one could play it back.

Then, in 2008, a team of scientists scanned that fragile paper, converted the lines into digital data, and — for the first time — heard a human voice from 150 years ago.

A trace of sound became sound again.
Information, once physical, had been transmuted.

That’s the kind of miracle librarians should be chasing.

Information isn’t abstract. It’s material — ink, grooves, pixels, bytes.
Every medium is just a different state of matter for meaning.

When Scott etched his recording, he created metadata without knowing it: wavelength, time, tone, human breath.
Modern scientists later re-interpreted that metadata and brought a lost moment back to life.

This is information science at its core — the transmutation of knowledge across formats, generations, and technologies.

And it’s what librarians, especially now, must reclaim.

For too long, librarianship has been treated as curation — collecting, storing, protecting.
But we are no longer just custodians of books. We are translators of human experience into enduring, searchable, sharable form.

That means building metadata not only around objects but around lived experience — oral histories, artworks, community events, even everyday stories that define a place.

Because the truth is, history doesn’t live in archives. It lives in people.

Nowhere is this more urgent than in communities whose stories have been under-documented — particularly African-American communities, whose histories are too often fragmented, oral, or held privately out of mistrust.

Libraries can — and must — change that.

We need to teach communities to own their data and their rights — to create metadata around their art, their stories, their performances, their cultural production.
That metadata becomes both protection and currency.

It’s how local creators can register ownership, negotiate digital rights, and monetize their work on their own terms.
It’s how we begin to close the digital divide not just with access, but with agency.

Libraries today face their own paradox.
Our digital services — databases, e-book platforms, streaming access — have never been more expensive. The business models that once made sense now trap us in dependence.

The pressure will pop eventually, because we’ve been paying for access instead of building infrastructure.

The solution isn’t just budget reform.
It’s re-engineering librarianship — empowering catalogers and metadata specialists to work like digital architects:
building content management systems (CMS) that describe, link, and preserve local creative output and community knowledge.

This is how we build the next library commons — one that doesn’t just lend content but creates it, protects it, and returns value to the people who made it.

The phonautograph’s soot-on-paper lines remind us that information is always physical before it becomes digital.
But every format — from soot to sound file — carries the same moral question:
Who controls the signal?

If libraries don’t help communities define, describe, and own their own information, someone else will.
And they’ll sell it back to us.

It’s time to stop seeing metadata as paperwork and start seeing it as power.
Because whoever builds the metadata builds the memory.

The next revolution in librarianship won’t be about technology.
It’ll be about translation — transforming lived experience into digital permanence, and digital permanence into local equity.

That is the new mission:
To make sure no voice, no history, and no creative spark ever fades into silence again.

✍️ Author Bio

Jen Baxter is the Founder of The Common Collective, an independent nonprofit civic organization dedicated to truth, connection, and courage. A veteran public-sector and nonprofit leader with 15+ years of experience, she brings a unique perspective to civic storytelling, organizational design, and leadership rooted in empathy and impact.

Until next time,

Guiding Principles 

People first | Transparency | Equity | Creativity | Accountability | Joy
www.thecollectivestories.org