The application of standardized labels to categorize content (e.g. by PEGI) can be considered established, sometimes even legally required, practice for marketing digital products of art (literature, films, games, music etc.). In that sense, today‘s sources of artistic practice (as potentially: tomorrow‘s objects of historical interest) often already bear explicit information regarding their moral/ethical nature, which are not necessarily fully included into respective metadata. Further, not only artistic but also scientific publication contexts increasingly react to the same idea of content-labelling (e.g. with symbols in repositories or by phrasing in-text „content notes“/"trigger warnings", especially for students).

Despite psychological details of the process being scientifically contested, a broad consensus about the overall positive effects of carefully administered content notes may be assumed. So research data and more specifically: a metadata scheme for describing research data should be prepared for the need to express content warnings, which are considered too important to just be implied.

This submission discusses a few techniques on how to balance data providers' responsibility to protect their users' interests, against the perception of scholarly paternalism, sometimes associated with "warnings" in academic contexts. It does so with the aim of improving existing representational strategies for content notes in metadata.