We had a customer call to report an issue in a demo site we have for Bonzai Intranet. There was a page that was supposed to display items from a document library based on the value of a managed metadata field. This field was populated with the correct values, but users did not see the values.

Though this content didn’t display, our metadata-based navigation was working which meant the metadata service was operational, but something was preventing the content from displaying. It felt like a permissions issue. We did some troubleshooting for a while and then we turned up this blog post in our research: Managed Metadata column values not visible

Did you know that there’s a hidden list that manages the permissions for users to view managed metadata terms?  I didn’t know that. No one else I talked to knew it either. Each site collection has this list, and by configuring the permissions of the list you can control who can access metadata. This is such a strange way to control access!

It turns out we migrated this site collection from a farm in
another domain and along the way the permissions for this list must have gotten messed up.

Resetting it to the default, Everyone with Read access restored metadata content to the user’s items.

Summary

Issue

Lists and document libraries that contain correctly set up and populated metadata columns however the content does not appear to users.

Cause

Permissions to the hidden metadata permssions library located at https://sitecollectionurl/Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList are not permitting users access to view metadata content

Resolution

As a site collection administrator:

1. Browse to the hidden metadata list by entering https://sitecollectionurl/Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList in your browser. Replace “sitecollectionurl” with the path to your site collection. e.g. https://sharepoint.example.com/sites/temsite/Lists/TaxonomyHiddenList
2. Edit the library’s permissions.
   1. In the Ribbon click on List, List Settings
   2. Permissions for this List
   3. Ensure permissions are unique and that Everyone has Read access.: Click Grant Permissions on the Ribbon and enter Everyone. Click SHOW OPTIONS and set the permission level to Read. 
   4. Click Share