Large-scale pandemic events have sent scientific communities scrambling to gather and analyze data to provide governments and policy makers with information to inform decisions and policies needed when imperfect information is all that may be available. Historical records from the 1918 influenza pandemic reflect how little improvement has been made in how government and policy responses are formed when large scale threats occur, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This commentary discusses three examples of how metadata improvements are being, or may be made, to facilitate gathering and assessment of data to better understand complex and dynamic situations. In particular, metadata strategies can be applied in advance, on the fly or even after events to integrate and enrich perspectives that aid in creating balanced actions to minimize impacts with lowered risk of unintended consequences. Metadata can enhance scope, speed and clarity with which scholarly communities can curate their outputs for optimal discovery and reuse. Conclusions are framed within the Metadata 2020 working group activities that lay a foundation for advancement of scholarly communications to better serve all communities.

Musicologists and music theorists have traditionally been early adopters of technological tools to assist with research. The earliest digital humanities projects in musicology and music theory came directly out of humanities computing and quantitative analytical technologies developed in the 1980s, but newer projects created since the mid-2000s still reflect this past of algorithmic analysis and archival compilation, retrieval, and display. Computational and archival research is, currently, only one branch of digital humanities. The umbrella of digital humanities research now also includes digital publishing, philosophies of digital research, and "born digital" projects that cannot exist outside of a digital medium (e.g., virtual reality or 3D modeling). This shift in the digital humanities represents a move to a "bigger tent" that includes more types of projects. Musicological and musico-theoretical scholarship is slowly moving in this direction.Music librarians have been at the forefront of identifying and promoting new digital tools and archives, even though these projects have tended to remain at the periphery of musico-theoretical discourse. They should be on the lookout for "bigger tent" projects, such as medieval and renaissance projects like the Isabelle D'Este Archive, Opening the Geesebook, and the Experience of Worship. These projects are characterized by being iterative and multi-modally engaging, as well as emerging from communities of practice and intentionally engaging a public audience. Music librarians should also be aware of systemic challenges to creating and supporting digital projects because these issues are at the center of libraries supporting all types of digital scholarship.

The scholarly communications industry is turning its attention to large-scale metadata creation for enhancing discovery of content. Algorithms used to train Machine Learning are powerful, but need to be used carefully, not least because they can perpetuate bias, racism, and discrimination. Effective use of Machine Learning means facing several technological challenges head-on. This article highlights the specific needs of humanities research to address historical bias and prevent algorithmic bias in creating metadata for Machine Learning. It also argues that the return on investment for large-scale metadata creation begins with building transparency into metadata creation and handling.

This article is in part about digital humanities projects and the metadata that supports them. It is also a call for project creators, publishers, aggregators, and professionals working on metadata and standards to start a conversation about how to incorporate digital humanities projects into the scholarly communications lifecycle in spaces where books and journal articles have dominated for decades. It begins this conversation by analyzing benefits and challenges of the metadata contributed to two projects - Preserve the Baltimore Uprising and The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon - and two platforms - Zooniverse and Mukurtu Content Management System. It proposes a couple of key pieces of metadata around which to build a standard for integrating digital humanities projects into publication.