Wash my mouth out with soap, please

Here's some of the breakdown of my job, which, for the record, I love: 25% Slavic language monograph cataloging, 10% cartographic materials cataloging, 20% generating digital content. So, if you have a digitized photograph of a Russian map in need of access points, I'm the man to see. I also catalog pictures, or, rather, create metadata describing digital images. This morning I volunteered for an informal usability study of possible interfaces for the library's online exhibit of University of Oregon Sports History. I enjoyed it, and hope that I provided some of whatever it was they sought. At one point, I was faced with an icon of a baseball and the year 1944. (Nevermind that there was no college baseball at Oregon in 1944 because of World War II.) It made sense to me that if I were to click on the baseball, in whatever year, I would call forth all baseball images from that year. Nope. Not the case. I won't go into why not. It is irrelevant for our purposes here dear reader. What matters is that I offered my opinion that it would be, should be, pretty easy to "map it to the metadata." Before the words had completed their escape (yes, escape) from my mouth, I felt dirty. Intuitively dirty. Filthy even. Fortunately for me, there are some old Russian children's books for me to catalog. Something pure. Something tangible. Something real. The simple act of cataloging a book! All I have to do is get past the drop-down menu from which I apply the online constant data selected from the list.