8. The Metadata Orchestrator

The metadata-orchestrator Tab 🟡

metadata-orchestrator controls how an item's metadata is displayed on its own detail page — the "Title: ... / Creator: ... / Date: ..." list you see when you click into a single collection item. It's marked yellow: you're meant to edit it as you add fields to your collection, but it links several other tabs together, so mistakes here are easy to make without realizing it.

Structure

Column	What it holds
field	The exact column name from main-metadata this row configures (e.g. creator, date, subject-in-English). Must match a real main-metadata column name exactly.
translate_id_metadata	An ID linking to this field's display label on the translation tab (e.g. metadata-creator → the label "Creator" / "Creador"). Same cross-referencing pattern as nav-bar's translate_id_nav.
lang	Which language(s) this row applies to — en, es, or en;es for both. See below.
browse_link	True if this field's value(s) should be clickable, linking out to the Browse page filtered to that value. Blank otherwise.
external_link	True if the value should render as an external hyperlink rather than plain text. Blank otherwise.

Only list the fields you want shown

Not every main-metadata column has (or needs) a row here. In this template, structural fields like objectid, filename, latitude/longitude, parentid, image_thumb, and the video-embed fields are deliberately left out — they drive other parts of the page (the image, the map, the video player) rather than appearing in a text metadata list. Only add a row for a field you actually want to show up as a labeled line on the item page.

Row order here also sets the display order — the sequence in this template (title, creator, language, date, description, subject, locations, source, format, rights, rightsstatement, plus this collection's custom fields) is exactly the order those fields appear on the item page.

Understanding the lang column

main-metadata handles bilingual fields two different ways, and metadata-orchestrator has to match whichever way each field uses:

• Split fields — main-metadata already has separate columns per language, like title-in-English and title-in-Español. These need two rows here, one per language, each with lang set to just en or es.
• Shared fields — main-metadata has a single column serving both languages, like creator or date (no creator-in-English/creator-in-Español split). These need only one row, with lang set to en;es — the underlying value is the same in both languages, but the label next to it (via translate_id_metadata) is still looked up separately for each language.

If you add a new bilingual field to main-metadata as a split column, give it two rows here. If you add it as a single shared column, give it one row with lang: en;es.

browse_link and external_link

• browse_link: True makes sense for tag-like, repeatable values — things worth clicking to see everything else sharing that value. In this template that's creator, language, both subject-in-* fields, both locations-in-* fields, and this collection's custom gender-strategy and LND_or_LNI fields. It's left off free-text fields like title and description, and off date, source, format, and rights — this project chose not to make those clickable, though you could turn browse_link on for any field you do want browsable, as long as it's also configured on config-browse.
• external_link: True appears only on rightsstatement in this template, since those values are typically full URLs to a formal license page (a Creative Commons or RightsStatements.org link) — worth turning on for any field whose values are themselves web addresses meant to be clicked out to.

Don't set both True on the same row — the template never combines them, and doing so isn't a tested pattern.

Common mistakes to avoid

• A typo in field that doesn't exactly match a real main-metadata column name — that field simply won't show up.
• Forgetting the second row for a split bilingual field — the field will be missing entirely from the language version you forgot.
• A translate_id_metadata with no matching row on translation — same failure mode as on nav-bar: a blank or broken label instead of real text.
• Adding a row for a structural field (filename, image_thumb, coordinates, video IDs) expecting it to appear as a metadata line — these aren't meant to be listed this way and won't behave as expected.
• Turning on browse_link for a field without also wiring that field into config-browse — the link may not lead anywhere useful.

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