LC21 A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (2000) / Chapter Skim
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5. Organizing Intellectual Access to Digital Information: From Cataloging to Metadata
5. Organizing Intellectual Access to Digital Information: From Cataloging to Metadata
Pages 122-143
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From page 122... ...
The Library of Congress, even more than most libraries, invests heavily in cataloging its collections. It probably has the largest cataloging operation in me worlds and is a source of both cataloging data and standards for much of the library community.
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From page 123... ...
However, a "full" cataloging record is not generated for many materials; less thorough cataloging records will naturally cost less. 6Any user of a library catalog, either in card or online form, is familiar with this subject tagging.
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From page 124... ...
records by the Library of Congress, in concert win the library community, in the 1960s was a landmark event in the automation of library operations. As recalled above, preautomation catalog sharing involved the physical shipment of catalog cards to fellow libraries.
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From page 125... ...
The Library's Network Development and MARC Standards Offices leads and coordinates international efforts to further develop MARC as a standard for the efficient and long-term interchange of bibliographic information. In recent years, the office has been analyzing the relationship of MARC to standard generalized markup language (SGML)
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From page 126... ...
, which provides "leadership in the creation and implementation of cataloging policy within the Library of Congress and in the national and international library community.''l5 Among the cataloging standards coordinated by CPSO are authority files (both names and subjects) to support MARC data elements, the Library of Congress classification rules, and Library of Congress subject headings, all described above.
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From page 127... ...
The Library's Network Development and MARC Standards Office serves as the maintenance agency for the EAD standard, an excellent example of the Library stepping in to play an important role in the new metadata environment. THE DIGITAL CONTEXT AND ITS CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL CATALOGING PRACTICES A user of the Web who has sampled any of the numerous search engines (e.g., Google, AltaVista, Excitel9 ~ might argue that digital content, networks, and full-text indexing have made human-mediated organization Trough cataloging obsolete.
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From page 128... ...
25Any user of Web search engines quickly becomes aware of the problem of synonym clashes, in which a search term has multiple meanings and results are returned for all these possible meanings, producing false hits that overload the results relevant for the query. For example, a user might want information about the planet Mercury and enter a query with that term.
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From page 129... ...
The simplicity of HTML markup severely constrains Internet search engines' use of such facilities, which are very useful for limiting and refining search results. The creation of structured descriptive records for resources (e.g., ~aditional cataloging records or, more generally, surrogates)
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From page 130... ...
Scale Traditional library cataloging has scaled up to serve institutions of great size prominent among them the Library of Congress. However, over the past year the number of resources on We Web has grown to the point that they exceed the number of books in even the largest of libraries and even the number of book pages in We average library.31 The growth rate of these networked resources substantially exceeds the growth rate of traditional physical resources.
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From page 131... ...
The cost of distributing networked content is low compared with the cost of printing and distributing hardcopy content, so there is little benefit to the publisher of maintaining older versions of a document.33 With no incentive to retain older versions, the management of objects is haphazard and object permanence is problematic. Such an environment has a strong impact on the economics and incentives for producing metadata and also points out the critical need for preservation-oriented metadata and mechanisms to manage the preservation of digital objects.
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From page 132... ...
These efforts are motivated by Me central role that the traditional cataloging formats play in the Integrated Library System and in the cooperative cataloging efforts described above. Notable among these efforts in the context of a discussion of digital resources is the creation of a new field to handle links to electronic resources35 and a set of 34mdex spamming is of considerable concern to search engine providers in that it interferes with the usefulness of their search engines.
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From page 133... ...
After all, one of the major strengths of the standardization on AACR2 and its expression in MARC records has been the uniform search interface provided by library catalogs to large and heterogeneous collections. The subject of multiple metadata vocabularies is the focus of further attention below in this chapter.
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From page 134... ...
The need for additional metadata types and for traditional metadata for a larger volume of materials challenges traditional means of metadata creation—manual techniques cannot be scaled up to meet demand.
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From page 135... ...
project,40 which is examining the use of new Web-based tools and techniques for cataloging electronic resources. One important aspect of CORC is that it examines the mechanics and economics of different levels of representation, whereby resources can be described simply using Me DCES and, when appropriate and economically feasible, described more completely using traditional cataloging techniques (MARC)
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From page 136... ...
The U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee43 has been working for several years to create a complete and complex metadata format for describing geospatial entities—Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata.44 The Open GIS Consortium, which comprises technology companies, universities, and government agencies, manages consensus processes with the goal of achieving interoperability among diverse ~eo-orocessin~ .sv~tems.45 Content Rating ~ A -- rip A_ ___ _ The motivation for content-rating metadata grows out of the proliferation of adult material on the Internet and the desire for filtering mechanisms to keep certain individuals (e.g., children)
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From page 137... ...
INTEROPERABILITY OF METADATA STANDARDS Cataloging has evolved from primarily a library practice into an activity engaged in across the Internet economy. As described above, the Library itself, faced with a proliferation of resource types and management needs, has undertaken and participated in a variety of metadata initiatives outside traditional cataloging.
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From page 138... ...
Authority files, described above, have been the primary mechanism in the library community for enforcing structural interoperability. · Syntactic interoperability~reators of metadata want to store, exchange, and use metadata records from different sources.
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From page 139... ...
Hunter, and Carl Lagoze, 1999, available online at |
From page 140... ...
Yet, the basic model of the MARC record, whereby cataloging metadata is packaged into discrete records associated with individual information artifacts (that is, MARC records are resource-centric) , makes it unwieldy to express the richness and complexity of these relationships.
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From page 141... ...
Lee importance of relationships in resource description of digital objects is also reflected In the metadata activities on the World Wide Web. The Web has demonstrated, even in its current primitive form, that the linkages (hyperlinks)
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From page 142... ...
The existing environment does not lend itself easily to any single institution devising its own strategies for coping with change in metadata practice. There is an enormous need for educating the library community on the implications of current developments, for creating initiatives to coordinate strategies, and for becoming seriously involved in the key metadata initiatives under way today, to ensure that actions taken are informed by the needs of the library community.
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From page 143... ...
It is a responsibility of the Library, and indeed of the nation, to offer leadership here for the benefit of the national and worldwide communities of information providers and users. Recommendation: The Library should treat the development of a richer but more complex metadata environment as a strategic issue, increasing dramatically its level of involvement and planning in this area, and it should be much more actively involved with the library and information community in advancing the evolution of metadata practices.
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