4. Editing Main‐Metadata

The main-metadata Tab 🟢

main-metadata is the leftmost tab in the CB-Remix spreadsheet, and the one you'll spend the most time in — it's your actual collection. It's marked green in the workbook's color system, meaning it's safe territory: you're expected to add, edit, and fill in rows here freely.

Every row is one item — a book, video, photo, document, whatever your collection contains. Every column is a piece of metadata describing that item.

Two things to know before you touch it

1. Fill in config first. Several of main-metadata's column headers — title-in-English, description-in-Español, and others — aren't typed text. They're formulas that pull your language names from the config tab (a header literally reads ="title-in-"&config!B6). Until lang1/lang2 are set on config, these headers won't show the right language names.
2. The header row is locked. Row 1 is grey and formula-driven — don't edit, rename, or reorder it. The code matches columns by these exact names.

Structure

Each row below the header is one item. There's no limit on how many rows you add — just keep adding rows underneath the last item.

The example collection in this template uses 28 columns. Here's what each one does:

Column	What it holds
objectid	A unique, short ID for the item — lowercase, no spaces (e.g. narrativasnobinarias). Used internally to generate the item's page and to link related items together. Must be unique across every row.
title-in-<Lang1> / title-in-<Lang2>	The item's title, in each site language. Header text is auto-generated from config.
filename	The item's file — see "About the filename column" below.
creator	Author(s)/creator(s). Separate multiple names with a semicolon (;).
description-in-<Lang1> / description-in-<Lang2>	A longer description shown on the item's page. Basic HTML (like <a href="...">) is allowed.
date	The year (or date) associated with the item. Powers the timeline and sorting.
locations-in-<Lang1> / locations-in-<Lang2>	Place name(s) associated with the item. Semicolon-separate multiple locations.
latitude / longitude	Decimal map coordinates matching the location(s) above. Powers the map view.
subject-in-<Lang1> / subject-in-<Lang2>	Subject or genre tags. Semicolon-separate multiple subjects — these power subject browsing and word clouds.
language	The language the item itself is written/recorded in (not the site's interface language).
source	Where the item comes from — a publisher, platform, or repository name.
format	The item's MIME type (e.g. video/mp4, application/pdf, application/html).
type	A general resource type (e.g. Book, Video, Academic Article, Dissertation).
rights	An access category (e.g. open-access, copyrighted, public domain).
rightsstatement	A more detailed rights statement or license, if you have one.
parentid	If this item is a child of another item (part of a compound object), put the parent's objectid here. Leave blank for standalone items.
image_thumb	A path or URL to a thumbnail image, for items where the main file itself isn't a displayable image.
embedding_webpage	Optional — for embedding an external interactive page directly into the item's page.
vimeoid / youtubeid	If the item is a video hosted on Vimeo or YouTube, the video's ID (not the full URL) goes here to embed a player.

Two columns in this template — gender-strategy and LND_or_LNI — are custom fields specific to this example collection (they categorize the linguistic strategy used in each item, which only makes sense for a collection about gender-inclusive Spanish). They aren't part of the core CB-Remix schema. You're free to delete them, rename them, or add your own custom columns the same way — just remember any new column needs to be wired up on metadata-orchestrator (and optionally config-browse / config-search / config-table) before the site knows what to do with it.

About the filename column

This one column does three different jobs depending on the item, and the template mixes all three:

• An uploaded file: a relative path like objects/Mapamundi.pdf, pointing to a file you've uploaded into your repository's objects/ folder.
• An external link: a full URL (e.g. https://traficantes.net/libros/furia-travesti), for items you're describing and linking to rather than hosting yourself.
• Blank: fine for items represented some other way — for example, a YouTube video that only needs youtubeid filled in, or an item that only has an image_thumb link.

There's no single "correct" choice — use whichever fits how you actually have access to that item.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Reusing an objectid on two different rows — each one must be unique.
• Putting spaces or special characters in objectid (stick to lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens/underscores).
• Filling in title-in-<Lang1> but leaving title-in-<Lang2> (or the other bilingual columns) blank — bilingual sites generally expect both filled in, even if it's just a repeated proper noun that doesn't translate.
• Editing the header row, or adding a new column in the middle of existing ones (add new custom columns at the end instead).
• Mismatched latitude/longitude that don't actually correspond to the locations text — double-check coordinates before pasting them in.

As with every tab, changes here don't reach your live site until you run Sync content from Spreadsheet in GitHub Actions.