Page 81 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 5

The Changing Face of Metadata

The foundation of any digital library platform is the underlying metadata
structures that provide meaning to the information objects which the plat-
form stores. However, this isn’t new for libraries. Libraries have traditionally
treated the creation and maintenance of bibliographic metadata as one of the
core values of the profession. We organize, categorize, and bring meaning to
content. Likewise, libraries have consistently evolved to support innovative
ways of promoting the findability of resources. As repositories of cultural
heritage information, libraries have always needed to be able to create
access points between an organization’s indexing system and the physical
location of the piece. How this metadata is created, captured, and stored
has changed throughout the years as printed catalog cards gave way to the
ILS (integrated library system) and the MARC (machine-readable catalog)
metadata schemas. As library metadata moved from print catalogs to online
catalogs, organizations like OCLC were formed to enable shared metadata
creation and a common set of bibliographic descriptive standards. From
within the library community, standards like AACR2 and RDA recognized
the changing face of metadata and helped to create a homogeneous metadata
ecosystem around the MARC schema, allowing metadata from one insti-
tution to be used by another. In these efforts, libraries and their partners
have been so successful that many have difficulty seeing a need to move
away from the status quo, and even more libraries struggle to embrace new
metadata models as more and more information is born digital. At the same
time, the role that libraries play in their communities continues to change.
Libraries have long since surrendered their roles at the center of their users’
information universe. While they still play important roles as content pro-
viders and preservers of the historical record, libraries are now only one of
many trusted information organizations. This shift has required libraries to
rethink how they provide access to materials, since their users have come
to expect digital access to content. As organizations develop digital library
platforms, this shift can be difficult, since organizations often must find ways
to reconcile the metadata utilized within their digital platforms with their
legacy systems and data capture procedures, while at the same time, they
must work to enable greater data interoperability with the variety of non-
library communities that now inhabit the information landscape.
Given the vital importance of library metadata and the continued need
to produce and maintain rich bibliographic systems and environments,
many cultural heritage organizations have struggled to keep up. Metadata
is expensive and difficult to create . . . and is largely transparent to the user
when done properly. This had led to a shift in many organizations, as many
have moved to minimize the staff used to create metadata within the library.
Unfortunately, this has left many organizations unequipped to evaluate the
metadata requirements necessary to develop a digital library platform. Leg-
acy bibliographic metadata has become so homogenous and print-centric
that many organizations lack the metadata expertise in-house to evaluate
new and emerging metadata frameworks, or they have no one on their staff
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