Anyone who has ever worked in developing or implementing metadata specifications will know that they’re not exactly a bundle of laughs, so metadata jokes are a rare and precious thing (cf Winston Jingo and Patrice Roux-the-Day.) So when I came across this image in 2016, I had to retweet it for the poor souls who suffered through the LOM and DC years with me.
Being mindful of copyright, I attributed it with a link back to the original blog it was posted on, BigSnarf. Turns out that BigSnarf were not creator of the image and 3 years later the real creator, Michael J. Swart turned up in my mentions to claim his quite rightful ownership. Michael was very gracious, and when I offered to delete my original tweet said he wasn’t too bothered, he was more interested to see how people were using and attributing his images.
Thanks. I don’t really care too much. It’s interesting to see who’s using my drawings and how. It’s sometimes with attribution. This is just the first time with a mistaken credit.
— Michael J Swart (@MJSwart) June 10, 2019
So instead I offered to write a blog post, which means I can re-post Michael’s image with the correct attribution and I can also use this as a teachable moment. Even if you do your best to attribute images correctly, sometimes you will get it wrong. If you do get it wrong, then immediately offer to make it right, by apologising, offering to remove the misattributed image and correcting the attribution. Oh, and Michael has also made lots of other very cool illustrations, which you can see here Articles by Illustration 🙂