Jacques Derrida famously asked in “The Law of Genre” (1980), “Can one identify a work of art…if it does not bear the mark of a genre?” As metadata elements, genres are both highly useful and highly unstable; the field lacks consistent and widely agreed-upon definitions of genres, and texts can evince traits of many genres in different ways and to different degrees. Based on a preliminary survey of recent literature, this poster identifies four common issues around the use of genre in digital libraries and identifies potential avenues for future research.