For hundreds of years, metadata was kept in a box. Literally. A wooden box, filled with paper cards. Libraries cataloged for one reason: to be able to find resources on a shelf. Today, though, we’re seeing a growing importance placed on metadata management activities. In an increasingly information-driven world, good metadata is the key to more than finding the right item.
Data-about-data is now used to track materials, assess needs, compare collections, inform research, manage workflows, plan budgets and even make friends. Catalogers have been joined by publishers, retail outlets, shipping companies, researchers, faculty, Web programmers, search engine optimizers and end users in the flow of metadata creation and modification. This puts libraries, and catalogers, right in the middle of a revolution in how we think about representing and describing information. And the more partners we can involve in these processes, the more chances libraries have to add value up and down a variety of data supply chains.
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Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director, Metadata Research Center, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says it’s a very exciting time to be involved with cataloging and metadata.
“People are getting wind of the fact that librarians are the experts,” she says. “There are a lot of partnerships being formed and people are looking to librarians for information standards and how to manage data. Never in our time has there been a more universal interest in producing structured, standardized information.”
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Jean Godby, OCLC Research Scientist, has been involved in several projects that seek to bridge the gap between library metadata and that of other systems. She manages the Metadata Schema Transformations project that seeks to insert interoperability into the management of digital resources.
“The situation we are attempting to deal with,” Jean says, “is defined as ‘schema-level interoperability,’ because we are trying to identify common ground among formally defined metadata schemas.”
Metadata crosswalk services exist already between MARC and Dublin Core, ONIX and MARC, ONIX and Dublin Core, MODS and MARC, and MODS and Dublin Core. These allow, among other things, for better workflows between libraries, publishers and book jobbers. And while easy correspondences between metadata systems are good enough for much of the day-to-day work in libraries, even the slightest incompatibilities can produce backlogs that translate into unfulfilled queries from users.
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